Eugene Onegin, 2024

A new minimalist production from the Royal Opera

Pushkin's lyric poem was published in 1833. The opera by Tchaikovsky  was first performed in 1879

For the first ten minutes, we thought perhaps the scenery had not been finished. This was a dress rehearsal, after all, ticketed for the Friends of Covent Garden but not open to the general public. But after a couple of scenes in which the characters came to the front of the bare stage and sat on wooden chairs to sing, the penny dropped – there was no scenery; the set was deliberately stripped bare, and Ted Huffman’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin was relying on the music and the performers alone to convey its drama.

This was certainly a novel idea, and you could feel the audience’s surprise. But did it work? There were some wonderful crowd scenes, with the full chorus in fine voice as farm workers, singing and line-dancing to their rousing harvest song; and in the second half at the ball, delivering real glitzy atmosphere with their tango-inspired movement and voguish costumes. (We got some nice hanging lights in this scene, too, redolent of a Visconti film, from designer Hyemi Shin). Transferring the action from the early 1800s to the 1940s worked well in a visual sense, with Onegin sauntering, hands in the pockets of his double breasted suit, shirt open at the collar, long curly hair flopping over his brow. (Putting Tatyana in trousers for her final scene, though, was mean, when everyone else had such gorgeous gowns.)

What was missing from this minimalist conception was the intense intimacy of the key scenes – Tatyana writing the letter in her bedroom in the middle of the night, Lensky, Kitty and Onegin arguing at Tatyana’s birthday party, Onegin and Tatyana’s meeting six years later at her new home, with husband and society in tow, and the showdown when Tatyana rejects Onegin. Ironically, that intimacy often comes from its setting against the general action: the party in full swing, the empty moonlit bedroom, the glittering ball – life going on in the background provides the context. At times the staging seemed clueless – the characters were singing cramped right at the edge of the stage (where many of the audience cannot see them), in the least powerful position to put across the action. This may have been deliberate on Huffman’s part, as if to indicate the emptiness of their world, but frankly, looking at bare floorboards for an hour and a half is pretty boring.

The music, though, was sensational – exquisitely played by the orchestra of the Royal Opera House under maestro Vasko Vassilev, it rose up through the house, clear as could be – and all the voices were fresh and individual. Liparit Avetisyan as Lensky brought real passion to his clear tenor and Kristina Mkhitaryan as Tatyana beautifully conveyed the pain of youthful heartache, powerfully delivering a soaring climax in her letter scene. Gordon Bintner as Onegin had a warm baritone, suitably laid-back in Act One but growing in strength and openness for his desperate declaration at the end.

Lucy Burge as movement director provided the bulk of the visual entertainment, with large fluid groups going from spectacular dancing, to more mundane setting tables and moving chairs. Sometimes the noise of their footsteps rang out against the soloists’ voices; at other moments they were frozen in a tableau. It was a contemporary, theatrical approach that gave another dimension to the chorus, who coped splendidly with the demands. The costumes by Astrid Klein were stunning. But looking at a stage filled with beautifully dressed people and a few chairs was not enough to make that magic cauldron of opera ingredients really come to the boil.