Opera North's Rigoletto - Northern Arts Review
Opera North at Leeds Grand Theatre
Rigoletto - Northern Arts Review
The pathetic fallacy. How can the best literary device of all time (I will go to the mattresses on this) have such a terrible name? It sounds like something my secondary school English teacher would have scribbled in the margins of my coursework and circled with a red felt-tip. But naming faux pas aside, can we all just agree that happy days should happen when the sun is shining, breakups should happen when there is a misty drizzle and murderous curses should only reach their reckoning on dark and stormy nights? There’s something so wonderfully excessive about it all. Human emotions? Too small for this moment – we need to call in our lads “the weather” for backup. Whilst King Lear might take first prize for the best use of the pathetic fallacy, Verdi’s Rigoletto is a breathtakingly close second. And judging by Opera North’s revival, I’m not the only one who appreciates a little meteorological melodrama. But there’s plenty of wickedness to enjoy before Act III unleashes the storm. Opera North have crafted a gloriously grubby world of excess and retribution, and I delighted in every minute of it.
First performed in Venice in 1851, Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, was adapted from Victor Hugo’s controversial play Le roi s’amuse, which had been banned after its first performance. Opera North’s production, directed by Femi Elufowoju Jr and first staged in 2022, returns this season with a largely new cast of principal singers. Elufowoju Jr has moved the action from the 16th century to contemporary Britain, turning the Duke of Mantua’s court into a private art gallery where wealth, privilege and corruption are the fashion. Rigoletto is the Duke’s sharp-tongued jester, an outsider who makes his living mocking the unfortunate husbands and fathers of his employer’s various conquests. Away from court life, he is a protective father determined to shelter his daughter from the seedy world he moves in. But when the Duke sets his sights on young Gilda, Rigoletto’s two worlds collide, and a curse delivered in anger becomes disastrously real.
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See you in the shadows my loves,
Sean x
