The rake punished

“COMPULSIVE philandering is one thing, but brutal rape…quite another”. So begins the introduction to Jonathan Kent’s production of “Don Giovanni” at Glyndebourne, which opened on May 22nd. The production had its premiere already in 2010. So it’s no wonder that, good as it was, the same production second time round somehow leads the mind to wander.

How could it be staged anew?

How about if Don Giovanni were a Frenchman?

The scene, as the curtain goes up, could be a studio flat in Paris. Don Giovanni is being interviewed by a journalist. Adjusting her tape recorder, she begins posing questions. He asks her to hold his hand, and then begins kissing her wrist, her arm, her shoulder. Soon he is trying to undo her bra, her jeans. “Help, oh heav’n!” she sings. “Will none befriend me?”

Before anyone can catch him, he escapes.

With the dawning of a new day, Don Giovanni is ready to start afresh. His servant, Leporello, transformed here into a French philosopher, has a medallion around his neck and a blue silk shirt unbuttoned to his navel. In Leporello’s right hand is the notebook in which he records his master’s conquests:  “Pretty lady, here’s a list I would show you, Of the fair ones my master has courted, Here you’ll find them all duly assorted, In my writing, will’t please you to look, Here is Italy, six hundred and forty, France is down for five hundred and twenty, Only two hundred the Rhineland supplied him, But mark the climax, Spain has already one thousand and three…”

In a New York hotel room before lunch, the Don is at it again. Enters stage right a maid with a service cart. Stage left the Don emerges from the bathroom, quite naked. He stretches out to touch the maid’s breast. As he tries, with his other hand, to close the door of the hotel room, he feels the thrust of a foot keeping it open. A former lover, spurned, is determined to save her successor. “Leave her, thou vile seducer! By heav’n I’m sent, thy perfidy to witness; And to prevent thee From deluding this poor girl’s experience With thy treacherous language.”

The girls gang up, the authorities are summoned. About to settle into a comfortable seat with a glass of champagne, the Don is hauled out of the first-class cabin of an Air France flight to Paris. “My soul is rent in agony! Condemn’d to endless misery, Oh, doom of wrath and terror, No more to see the light!”

Don Dominique at the opera. The possibilities are endless.