<<  -- 6 --  Roderic Dunnett    VERGING ON LONDON STANDARDS

Stowe's Don Carlo was in many respects -- like Dorset's recent Salvator Rosa -- well up to Glasgow, Leeds, and arguably Cardiff and London standards.

Don Carlo went through various metamorphoses. Already one of Verdi's mature operas (Paris, 1867), it reached London the same year, New York a decade later and belatedly, La Scala in 1884, improved and newly revised when Otello was already on the stocks; at which point the original Act I, the hunting scene near Fontainebleau, was finally jettisoned by Verdi.

Thus Stowe's version, based on Verdi's later thoughts, opened with the monastery scene, with Carlo, the recalcitrant grandson of Charles V, now living secretively as a monk in the monastery of St Yuste.

Here the monastery pervaded all, for Stowe's set, its pink, brown and grey stone a dead ringer for The Lion in Winter (crossed with Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral), and well enough designed by director Sarah Chew, dominated the entire action -- notably a horizontal set of steps whose varied levels were creatively employed. Aided by intelligent gradations in yellow-white lighting (presumably from Ian McKillop's technical team) this ominous, lowering presence set the tone for a highly charged drama whose battlements (not least when Philip or the Grand Inquisitor breached them) felt as ominous as Dunsinane or Elsinore.

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