Ferrando     Gregory Turay
Guglielmo    Neal Davies
Don Alfonso  Donald Maxwell
Fiordigli    Cara O'Sullivan
Dorabella    Imelda Drumm
Despina      Linda Kitchen

Conductor    Robert Spano
Producer     Calixto Bieito

Welsh National Opera

The Theatre Royal, Plymouth, is a fairly typical civic-centre theatre.
Opened in 1982 it has three semi-circular tiers and appearently
undistinguished sound. It is a regular stop on the WNO tours. The audience
was packed in in the cheaper seats at the back of the circle, but they were
rattling around in the stalls.

The singers and orchestra delivered a fair musical performance of Cosi last
night. Cara O'Sullivan as Fiordigli and, especially, Imelda Drumm as
Dorabella, sounded gorgeous. Neal Davies was a vocally chunky Guglielmo,
sounding like a particularly musical puppy. Gregory Turay as Ferrando
seemed a bit hoarse, but had some beautiful moments and probably has what
it takes. Donald Maxwell seemed to be doing Sprechstimme at times, but he
and Linda Kitchen as Despina were left so far adrift by the production it's
difficult to say anything about their musical performances.

Calixto Bieito and his team (variously from Barcelona) landed the
performers with a performance that looked stylish from time to time but
made practically no sense at all. The set was a mirrored space full of
metal cafe table and chairs, with a mirrored bar that appeared at the back
for the second act. An extensive group of supers dressed as cafe staff,
moved the tables around, as did Despina. That was the sole allusion to
class. The two men wore military whites (service indeterminate) and mafia
gear in disguise. The two women wore modern day clothes. Don Alfonso was a
bohemian drunk, Despina a char-lady with attitude who turned into Mystic
Meg (doctor) and Ms Versace with an English accent (notary).

Bieito seems to be trying to evoke the macho display and courtship ritual
of a mediterranean public space. The mafiot Albanians are major
crotch-graspers and physically maul the women while they are being "cured"
of the poison. This isn't totally implausible, since the point of the
Neapolitan setting (as seen from Vienna) is that girls are naughty and men
are naughtier. But setting the action in a public space makes the
conventions of the plot pointless. The women are clearly allowed out on
their own, and there's no scandal in them being with the men there. And
there's no opportunity for anyone to have sex in a cafe. A handful of
tangos and some physical business suggestested that lust was meant to be
close to the surface at all times. But the singers weren't able to suggest
passion about to erupt and being diverted into ritual and music.

Bieito's very physical, and sexually threatening, production of La vida es
sueno worked partly because the actors could get down and dirty when
required, but also because the play is explicitly about what happens to the
animal side of humanity when education and reason are forcibly withheld.
Cosi is about the fictions that we use to add a narrative to the pursuit of
sex, and in particular the hygienic convention that desire is for an
individual. We are meant to get very confused, as the characters do, but
we're not meant to look into the abyss, more to realise that we always live
with convenient deceptions.

There wasn't any obvious ending to Bieito's production -- the house lights
came up before the final ensemble, which caused the wrong kind of confusion
-- which pretty much summed up its pointlessness.