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Precious is a new-style weepie but one that is much more bracing than depressing
Precious
Theatre
Ian McKellen is captivating throughout. He delights in the play’s gallows humour, yet is also maudlin and poignant
Waiting for Godot
Theatre
Slight quibbles notwithstanding, this will set the West End’s stock riding high
Enron
Utterly, utterly brilliant. You really are in for a treat
Though 'Trilogy' has won rave reviews, I personally found myself exasperated after about an hour
We went on a quiet sunday evening and the food was excellent, but the experience let down by the service and ambiance
London,
Barry Millington's rating
Reader rating
Disappointing: Calaf (Gwyn Hughes Jones) and Turandot (Kirsten Blanck)
You can see why ENO might have thought it a bright idea to hire the West End director Rupert Goold for its new Turandot. With his Macbeth, Oliver and more recently Enron, Goold is good box office.
His production is a disaster, however, lurching in three acts from bad to worse to execrable. The setting is some kind of surreal Chinese restaurant in which the customers (the crowd in the Imperial City) seem to have turned up dressed for a Sixties theme party.
Since they include a nun, two Hasidic Jews, three Elvis impersonators and some sportspeople, it may be that the theme is fanaticism. But why the Chelsea pensioner or the clown? Or is it perhaps an acid party?
There’s certainly some toilet bleach, thrown in the face of the slave girl Liù in an attempt to get her to reveal the hero’s name. She thwarts her torturers by downing the rest of the bottle.
Act 2 begins on the fire escape of the restaurant: the courtiers Ping, Pang and Pong engage in backstairs gossip, overheard by a ubiquitous writer (Scott Handy). For Act 3 we are in the kitchen, suspicious-looking carcasses hanging from the ceiling, evil knives glinting.
Culinary references abound: grotesque pig-headed dancers are among the revellers; each of Turandot’s three questions is served up as a dish on a platter. Indeed the whole show’s a turkey.
There are ideas and theatrical sparks aplenty but they shoot in all directions: one senses no controlling vision, no discrimination between what might work on the operatic stage and what doesn’t.
Showing Liù (Amanda Echalaz) at the start as though at the end of a bad night on the town is not a good idea as she has nowhere to go. We’re left as unmoved by her fate with the toilet bleach as this poorly acted Calaf evidently was.
At least the latter, Gwyn Hughes Jones, delivers the notes of Nessun Dorma, though Kirsten Blanck is a disappointing Ice Princess.
Edward Gardner’s brittle conducting is more illuminating in the score’s proto-modernist passages than in conventionally romantic vein.
Until 9 December (0871 911 0200, www.eno.org).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
