28.11.1996

Mob society

Tom Ball reviews Rigoletto (English National Opera, London)

Opening just three years after Europe’s 1848 revolutions, Victor Hugo’s King Lear-like play, Le roi s’amuse, upon which Verdi’s Rigoletto (text by Francesco Maria Piave) is based, had only one performance before the French state censor stepped in.

It was no longer permitted that it be set in, and thus be implicitly critical of, decadent, 19th century Paris society, but instead had to be transposed to a fictitious Mantua governed by a duke.

Nevertheless, Le roi s’amuse and Rigoletto’s libretto and the criticisms of society they contain still troubled censors in several countries.

This production (in English) by the ENO must mark half a dozen times that the Jonathan Miller version has been revived: it has been a great crowd pleaser in the past, so the tired management of the ENO has turned to it again.

That said, baritone Peter Sidhom (Rigoletto) and company principal Janice Watson (Gilda), and a well-integrated orchestra under Noel Davies, have brought some freshness to Miller’s transposition of the setting to a 1950s New York Mafia milieu.

It is arguable that the greater realism’ of this setting helps or hinders the abstraction of a critique of bourgeois decadence that was intended in the original, since ‘the mob’ is at a remove from the legitimised crimes of capitalist society as a whole. Condemning gangsters’ behaviour does not facilitate concomitant condemnation of society’s crimes.

However, Rigoletto is no court jester here, but a barman who is a figure of ridicule in a Mafia-run hotel; a worker in the midst of drones. He takes care to keep his daughter, Gilda, hidden away from the clientele, but she is discovered.

The ‘duke’ (Bonaventura Bottone, tenor), or Mafia don, sweet-talks Gilda, who falls for him, thinking he is a student. The duke’s boys, assuming Gilda is Rigoletto’s lover, trick him into helping them abduct her for the duke’s pleasure; though she is willing, she realises later he is a libertine who has merely exploited her.

Rigoletto hires an assassin, who mistakenly kills Gilda in place of the duke.

Tom Ball