Zelmira 
4 stars Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Tim Ashley 
Tuesday September 2, 2003
The Guardian

Rossini's Zelmira, first performed in Naples in 1822, is about men behaving 
badly and women taking the blame. As with many of his operas, the subject is 
political, examining the integrity of those who wield power. Rossini's stance 
is monarchist, though he also plunges us into a familiar world of lies, spin 
and cover-up. 

Zelmira, daughter of the king of Lesbos (there are no gay connotations here),
 stands accused, in the wake of a coup d'�tat, of murdering her father Polidoro,
when, in fact, she is hiding him to keep him alive. Soon, the usurper is also 
found stabbed, for which Zelmira again takes the rap. Both the murder and the 
accusations prove to be the work of Antenore, a power-hungry general in the 
usurping army. Things get even worse when Zelmira's husband, Ilio, returns from
 foreign travels and is conned into believing the accusations to be true. 

Occasionally, it strains credibility. You feel that Zelmira is battling against
 one false accusation too many. Ilio also proves a problematic character: the 
alacrity with which he accepts his wife's guilt and the ease with which she is
 later prepared to forgive him are troubling for a modern audience. The score,
 meanwhile, reveals a weakening in Rossini's melodic imagination, though
structurally it is progressive by the standards of its day, blurring the 
difference between recitative and aria, and striving for long musico-dramatic 
paragraphs rather than a sequence of individual numbers. 

As always with Rossini, conflict is expressed in combative vocal pyrotechnics.
 Here, the contestants weren't ideally matched, with lesser-known singers 
outshining the stars. Bruce Ford is still the only tenor capable of negotiating 
Antenore's treacherously wide-ranging music, though his voice is not what it 
was. As Zelmira, Elizabeth Futral flung out coloratura with diamantine 
brightness. Dramatically, however, she maintained a glacial dignity throughout,
 rarely suggesting a woman in extremis. 

The great performances came elsewhere. Both Antonino Siragusa's staggering Ilio
 and Manuela Custer, as Zelmira's sidekick Emma, had the audience screaming for
 more. In Marco Vinco, cast as Polidoro, we have a bel canto bass of great 
distinction. The conductor, Maurizio Benini, is better suited to Rossini than 
to the Verdi and Donizetti operas he has been conducting at Covent Garden; here
 he was flawless in his judgment of the score's ebb and flow, and obtained 
playing of effortless brilliance from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. 



 ..................................... 

Hamlet 

 Royal Lyceum 

Michael Billington
Friday August 22, 2003
The Guardian 


A mood of bilious decay: a scene from Calixto Bieito's Hamlet. Photo: Murdo 
MacLeod

 
Only the naive would go to Calixto Bieito's Hamlet, co-produced with Birmingham
 Rep, expecting a model of textual purity. But where the cool Catalan's recent
 Macbeth brilliantly explored the politics of infertility, his two-hour Hamlet
 offers a portrait of moral decadence, as if royal rottenness were 
Shakespeare's only theme. 
Bieito's setting is a palatial private bar furnished with black leather chairs
 and an opulent drinks table. It is a world of hermetic luxury in which a white-
suited pianist picks out smoochy tunes, Claudius and Gertrude are sensual
 topers, Polonius a daughter-abuser, and Ophelia a flighty number who sings "My 
heart belongs to Daddy". But Bieito's art clearly belongs to Dada in that he is
 offering us a deconstructed Hamlet in which the text is rearranged to 
highlight the hero's alienation from this savagely self-indulgent milieu. 

It is a production of furious speed and glancing wit. I liked Hamlet's use of 
Hello magazine to point up contrasts between the old and new regimes, and 
Laertes's return from Paris with party-balloons and model Eiffel Tower. But my 
objection to Bieito's reading is that it is too fiercely moralistic and 
diminishes Shakespeare's spirit of intellectual enquiry. If the Ghost becomes a
 private emanation resulting from Hamlet's binge- drinking, it undercuts the 
play's debate about the ethics of revenge. And if Claudius is simply a drunken
 thug who pulls a knife on Hamlet even when at prayer, you sacrifice the 
character's mix of moral turpitude and political skill. 

This is a single-issue Hamlet in which virtually everything is subordinated to
 a mood of bilious decay. Bieito's approach also leads to some frenzied 
elisions in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern suddenly turn into the 
travelling players staging a louche Genetesque cabaret. You also gasp at the 
logic that allows Hamlet to express his puritanical sexual disgust by brutally 
raping Ophelia. 

Within the production's terms, George Anton is a powerfully costive Hamlet both
 hostile to and tainted by this world of animalistic appetite. Although her 
journey into madness is somewhat short-circuited, Rachel Pickup is also a 
frighteningly distrait Ophelia, and Diane Fletcher an unusually dynamic 
Gertrude. But it is highly revealing that Gertrude's lament over the drowned
 Ophelia is one of the few passages allowed to make a purely poetic impact: the
 problem with Bieito's production is that the text is largely treated as an 
adjunct to a mood of voluptuous viciousness rather than as Shakespeare's prime
 means of expression. 


 ..................................... 


...and from metropolitan barcelona magazine :

Barcelona Bard purists beware: the controversial Catalan theatre director,
 Calixto Bieto is bringing his Edinburgh Festival production of Hamlet to town
this month. The man who gave us Don Giovanni SNORTING coke on stage at the ENO
 and a LAP-DANCING Lady Macbeth in his technicolour kitsch reading of the 
Scottish play, is not shy of taking classic texts by the SCRUFF of the neck and
 giving them a violent shake to make them relevant to modern audiences. Calixto
 Bieto takes liberties with the text and with his audience's sensibilities, but
 when he does hit the mark, he has the KNACK of making us experience familiar
 texts afresh and he could never be accused of the worst sin of any theatre 
 director: leaving his audience indifferent. His bold, Goyaesque reading of
 Calderon de la Barca's La Vida es Sue�o (Life is a Dream) connected with
 audiences in Spain and Britain, while, despite the obvious faults of his
 Tarentino-inspired Macbeth, no one could deny that it was a tour de force of
 visceral, physical theatre: the murder of McDuff's children has never been so
 brutally realistic.

Calixto isn't a man to let things lie, and after Macbeth it was inevitable that 
he would turn his hand to Shakespeare's greatest, most psychologically complex
 and, dare we say it, 'sacred' work. This co-production with the Birmingham Rep
 stars Scottish actor George Anton (The Widowmaker, Ten Acres of Sky) as the
 paranoid prince and a fine supporting cast of British actors. Speaking of his
 version of Hamlet, Bieto says that instead of focussing on the customary
 political imagery of the piece, audiences should expect to see a royal family
 in Elisnore inhabiting a world closer to that of �Hola!. Let's just hope that
 doesn't mean a Posh Spice Ophelia TOTTERING OFF to the nunnery or a growling
 Pochuelo as Polonius.

This will be a production suitable for those who come to see Shakespeare with
 an open mind, for those who regard a text as a beginning rather than an end.
 It will be interesting to see how Bieto and his cast handle the complex
 demands of the deep metaphysical CONUNDRUMS and inner conflicts that make this
 meditation on the eternal questions of doubt and action such a key work in the
 history of humanity. If you believe, as Hamlet says, that 'Theatre is a mirror
 of life', then with Bieto's vision, the reflection it contains is sure to be
 intriguing.