Operatic spectacles don’t get much more humungous than Verdi’s ‘Aida’, with its teeming cast of Ancient Egyptians and grand temple scenes. Staged by Improbable boss Phelim McDermott, this new ENO production is suitably epic, conjuring up splendour with billowing silks and blindingly beautiful pyramid-shaped shafts of light. But his eclectic approach means it’s shot through with wit and human touches, too.
Its blue-haired heroine Aida is deeply, secretly in love with Radamès, a leading general – played with crowd-pleasing vigour by ENO favourite Gwyn Hughes Jones. Unfortunately, he’s caught someone else’s eye. ‘I will destroy you!’ sings the pharaoh’s jealous daughter Amneris, with admirable honesty, as she discovers that her servant Aida is her rival in love. This love triangle is set against a backdrop of simmering war: Aida is an Ethiopian prisoner, held at the Egyptian court as Radamès rides to defeat her people.
It’s a plot that’s robbed of dramatic tension by the campy pageantry of its temple scenes, and its characters’ almost divine ability to show up whenever some kind of intrigue is happening. Poor Amneris (Michelle DeYoung) struggles to create the requisite sense of menace in a series of challengingly geometric get-ups.
But elsewhere, McDermott fights against this static feel by injecting fluid, unearthly movements of all-female circus company Mimbre, who form towers or become a single, many-limbed temple deity. And there’s real warmth in Aida’s scenes with her vengeful father Amonasro: Latonia Moore’s performance is wonderfully subtle, conveying each fresh agony of her situation, and her voice blends with Musa Ngqungwana’s to richly emotive effect.