By inviting Calixto Bieito to direct Johann Strauss, Welsh National Opera no doubt expected something that would catch the headlines, a show to give a boost to what otherwise looks a very ordinary autumn programme. At the moment, Bieito polarises opinion more sharply than any other opera director we see regularly in Britain, and everything he does seems to provoke outrage. But the only proper reaction to this Fledermaus is a prolonged yawn.
Though the cast work with the energy that is typical of all Bieito's shows, this show is a massive, tedious disappointment, without any obvious redeeming feature. There is not a hint of the fresh perspectives and sheer theatrical brilliance Bieito - offered in his productions of Don Giovanni and A Masked Ball for English National Opera. Claude Schnitzler's conducting, meanwhile, is approximate and coarse-grained, and the singing more or less ordinary.
By asking playwright Mark Ravenhill to supply new dialogue for the production, Bieito presumably sought to breathe new vigour into the notoriously broken-backed dramatic structure of this operetta. But Ravenhill's contribution solves nothing; in fact it creates its own set of problems. His text, predictably, is contemporary, demotic, and disappointingly unfunny: the jokes are crude rather than witty, and rely on shock value. But Waltzing and Fucking this isn't, and the dissonances between Ravenhill's language, the more staid English translation used for the sung numbers, and the visual setting in the 1900s Vienna of Freud and Zweig are constantly disruptive.
Bieito offers nothing to bind all these elements together, except a progressive disintegration into insanity and chaos that mirrors the progressively weakening dramatic force of the work itself. The mechanics of the farce in the first act are efficiently if not particularly adroitly managed. The second and third acts are run together, so that Orlofsky's ball, messy and unfocussed, leads into the final gaol scene: life is one long party and life is also a prison, it all seems to be telling us, and that is just not interesting.
There are times when one weeps for the performers. To see a singer as accomplished as Sara Fulgoni so self-consciously delivering the leaden words put into Prince Orlofsky's mouth, or Geraldine McGreevy obliged to turn Rosalinde into a mixture of Joan Sims and the Queen Mother, evokes nothing but sympathy. Donald Maxwell turns into a typically bluff performance as Frank, while Paul Nilon, trouper that he is, does everything asked of him as Eisenstein with unflinching professionalism. But it is all for a hopelessly lost cause.
· Until September 27 (box office: 029-2087 8889), then touring.
