2023-12-04 10:13:02
The beginning of the expected Rigoletto which premiered this weekend at the Teatro Real in Madrid is overwhelming, promising. A woman enters the audience and runs in terror. On the stage, with the red curtain still down, a pack of men in formal dress, but with rabbit masks, catch her, fall on her, and rape her. Suddenly the entire curtain detaches and falls, the duke’s palace opens vaporously before the eyes as if they were a woman’s petticoat. In the background, deep in the background, as was not used in the Teatro Real for years, about thirty courtiers, all wearing rabbit masks, look out from the blackness. The duke begins to sing This or that, the herd of Italian nobles is approaching. A dozen women dressed in gold outfits, like something out of a perfume advertisement, hover around the duke.
This past weekend the premiere ended with boos. Boos that were not directed at the musical part, but at the stage direction by Miguel del Arco. The Real audience, where a ticket costs more than 300 euros, was not satisfied with the reading and made it known. Del Arco wanted to offer a new look at Giuseppe Verdi’s classic, focusing on rape culture and heteropatriarchy, for which he did not hesitate to officiate a ritual of desecration that reaches its highest point in the third act, when the public expected to hear and delight in the well-known The woman is mobile.
There, the director decides to place the scene in a city suburb where prostitutes swarm, something that is not in the script; after which, he makes several of them, dressed in an ugly way where fluoride and leopard predominate, simulate masturbation to the duke while he sings that “woman is fickle (…) he changes his accent and thoughts (…) Always a funny man , beautiful face, in tears or laughter, he is a liar.” The tension created by these dancers who shake their hands, does not allow the musical piece to be listened to with delight.
“Rigoletto It is an opera where the music is outrageous, but there is a bourgeois gaze that has been subtracting what the libretto tells to stay with the beauty of the music, without anything disturbing. They can say that the scene is free, for me it is essential,” Del Arco tells this newspaper. A scene that the most traditional sector of Real does not seem to be going to forgive. In the hallways, during the premiere, harsh words could be heard, calling the artistic team slums, denouncing the montage as pornographic and even advocating to denounce it.
You wanted broth, have two cups
The Teatro Real wanted that type of look, so present in other arts, to also be in its programming and has called on whoever it knew could give it. Del Arco became known to the general public due to the success of the work The function to be done, with which he won seven Max awards. Then they would arrive The misanthrope (2013), Antigone (2014) o Hamlet (2016), where he demonstrated to be a stage director who is very attentive to dramaturgy and capable of bringing the texts closer to the present through a deep analysis of them. But it was in 2020, when Del Arco would release packa piece structured with fragments of the interrogations of the members of the pack that raped a young woman at the Sanfermines festivities of 2016 and fragments of the young woman’s own statement.
That montage quickly became a milestone in the uprising against patriarchy. And less than a year after this premiere, when Del Arco is still on everyone’s lips, the Teatro Real and its artistic director, Joan Matabosch, called him to stage Rigoletto. The operation is clear. But the Teatro Real protects every project it carries out. In the musical direction, one of the world’s great Verdi experts, Nicola Luisotti, and great figures such as the French baritone Ludovic Tézier, the Romanian soprano Adela Zaharia and the Mexican Javier Camarena were called for the role of the duke.
This time Camarena has not arrived at his best moment, well loved at Real, the applause he received was protocol. But everything is measured in this theater. In the second cast, which represents the work on alternate days, the Duke is played by the Basque tenor Xabier Anduaga, who at only 28 years old is called to revolutionize the lyrical scene as he demonstrated this year during his time at the Met in New York. where the public and critics paid homage to him. Whoever attends this production will be able to witness several moments of high musical voltage, such as the aria Dear Name played by Zaharia or the overwhelming Courtiers, vile damned race by Tezier. But clearly this production will be remembered for its genre reading that does not stop during the three acts.
The woman will be present at all times through the cast of dancers directed by Luz Arcas who are either hostess girls in the palace or prostitutes in the third act and who are always submissive and dependent on the man. The garden of the beautiful daughter Gilda in the first act will become a cage. And the third act will open with an audio of a rape where while a woman desperately screams we hear the pig-like moans of a man snorting.
Although this Rigoletto, despite that great beginning and its new reading, is not aesthetically high-flying. Many will remember the one directed 15 years ago by Monique Wagemakers, rationalist, colder and with the impressive costumes by Sandy Powell made by Lorenzo Caprile, the well-known designer supported by the Royal House. Here the aesthetic framework, which at times recalls the Eyes Wide Shut by Kubrick, does not manage to overcome either through the space proposed by Sven Jonke, or with a more than questionable costume by Ana Garay.
From buffoon to member of rape culture
In the vision proposed by Del Arco, texts that were perhaps written, conceived and received in a different way in the 19th century, are given new meaning. For example, the relationship between Rigoletto and his daughter. It is the first act, Rigoletto returns to the house where he has hidden his beautiful daughter so that she does not become a victim of a society that he well knows would mistreat her. But what was written to reflect a stern but protective father, here is rebelled as a situation of pure domination and submission. Something, on the other hand, that simply listening to the lyrics of the libretto is impossible to ignore.
And the figure of her daughter, Gilda, who has traditionally been treated by opera in a certain prudish manner, as an innocent, somewhat sappy damsel, Del Arco turns her into a kind of Antigone, the political insignia of a conscious woman who sacrifices herself. for love. Perhaps this is one of the most powerful points of the montage, Del Arco manages to recover a character who until today was buried in kilos and kilos of misogynistic paternalism.
Another story is the treatment of the figure of Rigoletto himself, who at times seems more like a dandy than the crooked mirror of power that the figure of the jester represents in the European performing and literary tradition. Here the hump disappears, and with it the figure of the survivor who, being doomed to social ridicule, approaches power thanks to his ingenuity. Del Arco defends that this did not interest him, he sees in Rigoletto someone who reproduces in his daughter the procedures of a sexist world, “Rigoletto’s deformity is not only physical, but also of his soul and we have tried to bring that deformity to the stage space ”, he explains to this newspaper. Rigoletto is someone who sees one thing when it really is another. Thus, the space is transformed, the black mountains become lush gardens that are really cages and the sumptuous curtains fall to become floors that are walked on. A bet that is perhaps too conceptual to take on stage and that also distances itself from the political and class reading that the opera has.
What has become clear with this premiere is that the Real’s audience, those who dressed somewhat like the courtiers who appeared on stage, although they did not wear masks, will also have to get used to the turn of the century where there are certain readings that are taking over. . The work will be on display until January 2, and then arrive in February at the Abao Bilbao Ópera and next season at the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville, the other two Spanish co-producers of the production. In July 2024, the production is scheduled to arrive at the home of its other co-producer, The Israeli Opera from Tel Aviv. In conversation with this newspaper, Del Arco expressed his doubts about going as stage director of the production to the Israeli capital, “I haven’t decided yet, we are thinking about whether we should go to a country that is responsible for a horrible genocide on the Palestinian people.” “, he claimed.
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