Don Giovanni - Oxford Times

Don Giovanni: Garsington Opera at Wormsley

2:34pm Wednesday 6th June 2012

By Christopher Gray

Don Giovanni’s catalogue of conquests — including, of course, the famous “mille e tre” in Spain — is removed from Leporello’s fat little book and reproduced as a computer print-out in Garsington’s modern-day staging of Mozart’s great opera. So long is the list that yards and yards of white paper are spewed from the machine and draped across the wide spaces of Leslie Travers’s swish silver-and-white penthouse set, to the astonishment of Donna Elvira, the dirty Don’s rejected lover

Don Giovanni (Grant Doyle) and Donna Elvira (Sophie Bevan)
fight over Zerlina (Mary Bevan).

Photo: Mike Hoban

A rival to this richly comic moment comes later as the furious Elvira (Sophie Bevan, in superb voice) — in an effort to prevent an addition to the lothario’s list — becomes involved with him in a tug-of-war in which the sexy Zerlina (Mary Bevan, sister of the above) doubles as the rope.

Mind you, one suspects that the chavvy gum-chewing minx would far rather victory went to the Don. As portrayed by Aussie, Grant Doyle, he is a gentleman to whom women willingly submit — as in the opening moments when we find Donna Anna (Natasha Jouhl) complicit in her rape to the extent of chaining her attacker to a table. 

Sado-masochism rears its head more than once in a version of the opera that comes across as relentlessly sexy — understandably so, perhaps, in view of its subject matter.
Jesús León as Don Ottavio — ever the poodle of Anna — becomes more than usually her creature here, submitting to the indignity of being dragged in on a lead when the masqueraders visit Giovanni’s dance. Other outfits, including a fetishistic black plastic number, are plucked from the well-stocked wardrobe of Zerlina’s muscular fiancé Masetto (Callum Thorpe), who appears to run a fancy dress hire business when not working (as his own garb suggests) as a circus ringmaster.

So far, so good. Where one does take issue with Daniel Slater, though, is over the scenes involving the ‘slain’ Commendatore (Christophoros Stamboglis). When he accepts a dinner date with the Don, he arrives not as a statue gifted with speech and movement but as a hospital patient who might not even be dead.

And the ‘hell’ to which his host is delivered, by means of a lethal injection from Ottavio, appears from the look of the white-shrouded figures in various uncomfortable poses around him to be some sort of mental institution. Equating hell with such an establishment borders, to me, on the offensive.

Much will be forgiven, though, in a production so richly rewarding musically, under conductor Douglas Boyd.

With so many big voices around — occasionally too big in the case of Anna — Mr Doyle holds his own throughout in the title role. He is well matched by his sidekick Leporello, played by fellow Australian Joshua Bloom — and, mentioning matches, how unusual to find in a production of this opera a master and servant actually able to slip comfortably into each other’s clothes. 

Link to original review here