When future historians write the story of 21st-century film, Mike Figgis will play a founding father-like role. Figgis's Timecode (2000) was one of the world's first and most ambitious digital films. I still remember the excitement the day I saw it, the unified screen before me shattering into shards of narrative. This was the first film to sing in four simultaneously cast parts in the manner of a Bach fugue. Notwithstanding its many faults, it felt like the silver screen's Ring cycle. Last night saw Figgis try his hand at a real Gesamtkunstwerk, Donizetti's rarely heard Lucrezia Borgia (1833). Could he refashion opera as he had once done film? The ENO were dearly hoping so.
When the history books on 21st century film are written, Mike Figgis will play a founding father role. Timecode (2000) was one of the world's first digital movies, a film that sang in four simultaneously cast parts in the manner of a Bach fugue. It was the silver screen's Ring. Last night saw Figgis try his hand at a real Gesamtkunstwerk, Donizetti's rarely heard Lucrezia Borgia (1833). Could he refashion opera as he had once done film? The ENO were dearly hoping so.
At first it seemed like he might. Appearing on the curtain was a boldly jerky Italian documentary on the lives of 15th-century courtesans. It was very subtle, very clever. Were we in fact watching the brutalised childhood of nymphomaniac Lucrezia Borgia or the confessional narratives of Silvio Berlusconi's bunga-bunga girls?
Boundaries were blurred. Expectations were high. Figgis had evoked much in this opening. Surely the curtain would lift on something extraordinary. It did. The wrong music. The overture had been cut and Lucrezia's entry brought forward. I wouldn't have minded - and neither would have Donizetti - if it had added anything but it didn't. Meanwhile on stage, we received little more than a history lesson: scenery from the 1990s, blocking from the 1970s, costume from the back of the period drawer.
Figgis appeared to have ploughed all his imagination (which wan't always the very safest of bets) and attention into the little films. The result was a failure to realise that Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia is a comedy not a tragedy. Listen to the music and you won't fail to notice that, even by the standards of bel canto, the opera's rum-ti-tum count is high and rarely, if ever, disturbed by clouds of orchestral darkness.
The story may read like a taut Freudian thriller, filled with Oedipal tensions as Lucrezia seeks to redeem her mess of a life by bedding her long-lost son, Gennaro, only to find herself resorting to bad habits, murdering Gennaro's five buddies and then Gennaro himself, but the music - and Paul Daniel's cod translation - leads the ear to the land of the Carry On.
The increasingly mixed bag of filmed back-storying preludes (a living recreation of a Bronzino painting being one of the highlights; a classically Figgis bit of gratuitous lesbian action being one of many low points), showing a wronged and therefore fruit-loopy young Lucrezia, kept hinting that we were about to encounter a piercing assault on 15th-century patriarchy. No such luck. Something pointless and rum-ti-tum needed to be said first.
In the second half, set decisions improved. Peter Mumford's lighting stopped having to try to hide how little scenery there was and began to be able to flatter Es Devlin's dinky sets: a gilt chapel, a Ferrara-filled proscenium arch and a Last Supper tableau that frames the fated Gennaro and friends in the final scene. One last film, which shows Lucrezia receiving a forcible infibulation at the hands of some creepy nuns (their heads in tights) and giving up her son, Gennaro, accompanied by a soft, sighing musical prelude, saw Figgis's film-making at its most powerful. So much so that it upstaged the final reveal.
The singing was fine, if safe. Claire Rutter was a powerful, if overly sane, presence in the title role. A delightful flickery tone from Michael Fabiano warmed the cockles. Alastair Miles's was decently Machiavellian as Lucrezia's husband. Elizabeth DeShong's Orsino (usually a travesty role but this time not) was industrious, captivating and clear. Paul Daniel was as clunky in the pit as he was with his pen. The choir was invisible. As, increasingly, seemed the worth of the opera. Rum. Ti. Tum.
Watch Dame Joan Sutherland singing Lucrezia Borgia's final aria in 1972