Nik Ashton's new production of Lucia di Lammermoor for Opera Holland Park is a forceful attempt to turn an opera best known as a virtuoso showpiece into a cogent piece of music theatre. It is a brave effort, though Ashton's decision to update the work from the period immediately after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the early years of Victorian expansionism occasionally blurs Donizetti's purpose.
Donizetti saw Lucia as the victim of political division, hounded to madness by her Jacobite lover Edgardo and her Unionist brother Enrico, both of whom demand control over her life, though neither is willing to give an inch when it comes to ideological compromise. Ashton, however, makes them a pair of feuding Dickensian capitalists, with Lucia the victim of monetarist obsession. The opera's wider dimension vanishes in the process.
Ashton is strong, however, when it comes to images of familial claustrophobia and of women as pawns in a world run by men. We first see Anne Sophie Duprels's Lucia following the coffin at her mother's funeral with Mark Stone's dangerously handsome Enrico at her side, his eyes already homing in on her as the next object of his machinations. Lucia's mental instability is apparent almost at once, though both Stone and Philippe Do's Edgardo are oblivious to it.
Do - lightish of voice and impeccably stylish - plays Edgardo as boyishly naive rather than Byronic, painfully unaware of the consequences of his actions until too late. Stone, giving an exceptional performance, threatens and cajoles, and is pruriently fixated on Lucia's sexuality, his mind ultimately more warped than hers.
Under his influence, Duprels's Lucia cracks with alarming dramatic vividness, although vocally she is not quite up to the role's demands. Her singing is characterised by Verdian opulence rather than Donizettian fluidity. Her high notes are ringing and full, though she lacks the ability to sing softly above the stave or deliver a genuine trill, so crucial to Donizetti's portrayal of mental instability. You sense that some of the coloratura doesn't come easily: the hellishly difficult arpeggios at the end of her first-act aria are omitted in a performance that otherwise gives us the score uncut.
The conductor, Jeremy Silver, seemingly takes his cue from Duprels in that he makes much of the opera sound like mid-period Verdi rather than genuine Donizetti. The evening has moments of overwhelming power, though it also has its flaws.
· Until August 9. Box office: 0845 230 9769.
