Opera
Victorian Opera’s Abduction – an interpretation of Mozart’s opera that sidesteps its orientalism – showcases some stunning new talent but scurries over complexity and nuance. By Tim Byrne.
Victorian Opera’s Abduction balances West v East
The first thing to notice, well before entering the theatre, is the brutally edited title. Mozart called his 1782 singspiel The Abduction from the Seraglio, but Victorian Opera’s new production of the comic opera is simply titled Abduction. While this streamlining seems like mere pragmatism – most of us wouldn’t know a seraglio if we tripped and fell into one – it functions as director Constantine Costi’s organising principle: if it feels slightly confusing or problematic for modern audiences, jettison it.
What we’re left with might be fun and certainly showcases some impressive new vocal talent, but it highlights a central difficulty for contemporary directors of opera. How do we present antiquated material in a way that respects the artistic intentions of the originals without reinforcing their outmoded cultural assumptions or retrograde value systems?
One barrier a director of this work must surmount is its patent exoticism, which was ironically the reason Seraglio was such a hit during the composer’s lifetime. The opera comes out of a context that pitted Western cultural norms against that of the “orient”, in this case the Ottoman Empire. For generations before the opera was written, Muslim corsairs would hijack ships in the Mediterranean Sea and abduct people, either for use as slaves or to extract a hefty ransom. Turkish culture was seen as debauched and licentious, morally suspect but potentially liberating too. A seraglio – the women’s quarters of a Turkish palace that functioned as a harem – was both a dangerous and titillating setting for an opera. It was the equivalent of the woods in a fairytale, a place where characters might lose their wits on the way to some kind of transformation or epiphany.
Costi’s answer to the troubling duopolistic construct underpinning this work, where the West is the embodiment of civilisation and the East represents all that is decadent and debased, is to drain the material of its historical associations altogether. Rather than set Abduction in a recognisably 18th century Turkish environment or challenge its themes through elaborate anachronisms, this production envisions its characters in a kind of contemporary sex club or demimonde. Visual cues fold in references to Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink, Margaret Atwood’s Gilead and, perhaps most germane here, the Phantoms from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, complete with dark sunglasses and ostentatiously bored postures. It’s a heady mix but seems specifically designed to mean as little as possible, as if the key artistic motivation was plausible deniability.
We open on a closed red curtain, the central parting obscured for too long by a large heart-shaped frame straight out of a dodgy suburban brothel. Through this curtain pass our two female leads, Konstanze (Cleo Lee-McGowan) and Blonde (Katherine Allen), powered by an unquenchable curiosity about what lies beyond.
They haven’t entirely forgotten their straitlaced fiancés, Belmonte (Kyle Stegall) and Pedrillo (Douglas Kelly); part of the appeal seems to be the transgression itself, a minor act of rebellion before settling down to married life. When the boys try to follow, they’re confronted with the door bitch, a snarling, chaps-clad bully named Osmin (Luke Stoker). Getting past him only leads them further down the rabbit hole, into a world ruled by a mysterious and beautiful figure, the Pasha (Lyndon Watts).
Any attempt by the production to sidestep the dangers of orientalism comes to a crashing halt with this character, who appears less of an authoritarian threat than a spiritual guide or agent of transcendence. Watts looks magnificent in the opulently flowing costume – Matilda Woodroofe and Nathan Burmeister co-designed the set and costumes – and slinks around the playing space like a haughty, androgynous bird of plumage.
It’s a non-singing role – a pity, as Watts has a pure, clarion tenor – that can be indicative of a director’s overall approach. This Pasha’s exoticism, for instance, is refracted through the prism of gender as much as race. With his stance and walk, the way he cocks his head and smiles demurely, Watts evokes the “voguing” of gay Black and Latino ballroom culture. Costi largely ignores the implications of this, though, and the Pasha remains a cipher, a figure of cool and unattainable beauty, entirely othered.
The two couples are an easier prospect from a director’s perspective, although the demands on the singers can be fiendish. Belmonte and Pedrillo appear initially as unreconstructed blokes with ill-fitting suits and pairs of binoculars around their necks, as if they’d just placed a multi on Sportsbet. Stegall has a fine if slightly underpowered tenor that is required to scale some precarious heights – his notoriously difficult aria “Ich baue ganz”, with those intricate runs and awkwardly high register, feels less like the character’s display of ardour and more like a strained acrobatic floor routine. Kelly is solid as the daggy and good-natured Pedrillo and Stoker is fun as the opera’s chief villain. He also struggles with the ludicrous demands of his third act aria, “O, wie will ich triumphieren”, those insanely low notes failing to reach over the orchestra pit.
The men are good, but vocally and dramatically it’s the women who triumph. Lee-McGowan draws a complex and sensitive portrait of a young woman coming into her power, aware of social convention but ready to push into thrillingly uncharted territory. She develops a tense frisson with the Pasha that seems to go beyond the merely sexual, and her aria “Ach, ich liebte” is commanding and supple. Just as good is Allen’s Blonde, a more riotous and undisciplined character rendered with absolute control and energy. Her charged, rousing aria “Durch Zärtlichkeit”, telling Osmin where he can stick his overtures, is a production highlight. These two young singers are among the most exciting new vocal talents in opera.
Conductor Chad Kelly leads an attentive Orchestra Victoria through its paces, with a score that includes some additions from Mozart’s oeuvre – a bit of incidental music from The Marriage of Figaro and some gorgeously celestial snatches from his Mass in C minor – that add depth and variety. Kelly’s tempo is lively throughout. It gives proceedings real momentum but occasionally feels simply rushed. Again, the impression is of a production scurrying over complexity and nuance in the desire for breezy reassurance.
It’s curiously lacking in serious engagement or interpretive ambition. Woodroofe and Burmeister have created a cheekily suggestive chocolate-box setting peopled with strange and sexual beings, lit luxuriously by Paul Jackson, but Costi never quite knows what to do with them. Having stripped the plot of slavery and sexual stakes, of any sense of place or history, he’s left with something thin and unsatisfying, almost evasive.
Abduction is sometimes gorgeously sung and stylishly conceived, but it can’t close the widening gap between what used to thrill audiences and what we now find unacceptable.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 23, 2025 as "Orient express".
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