Benvenuto Cellini

Phew! There is no faulting director Terry Gilliam’s ambition. Indeed, he easily matches French composer Hector (‘bonkers’) Berlioz in the creation of bombastic works that others might reasonably consider unstageable. Gilliam’s debut show at ENO, the award-winning ‘The Damnation of Faust’ treated us to a fully realised history of early twentieth-century Germany, complete with the 1936 Olympics and the Holocaust. His return with another Berlioz work has a lot to live up to.  

The work itself – a first attempt at opera by Berlioz from 1838 – is bloated and dramatically clumsy, a lumbering story involving a planned elopement and an uncompleted commission to cast a golden statue of Perseus for the Pope.

But what a show the auteur and ‘Monty Python’ animator (aided by co-director Leah Hausmann) makes of it. He has created the sense of watching a film: sideshows always accompanying the main action, trompe l’oeil houses whirl past downstage, a hundred cast members do a hundred different things from acrobatics to drinking and fighting. It is an extraordinary spectacle, the largest, kitschiest cabaret you may ever see, and unmissable for that alone.

In the title role of the talented sculptor, rogue and chancer, heldentenor Michael Spyres is superb. He copes comfortably despite the terrifically high tessitura of the Cellini role and the need to compete with a large chorus and orchestra at full tilt.

Yet even his gifts and Gilliam’s limitless flair cannot cover Berlioz’s clumsy plot, the turgid libretto, the overblown music. The director says he had wanted to cut out much of it but was forbidden from doing so by music director and maestro Edward Gardner. The conductor, meanwhile, energetically pushed the orchestra to produce a spirited account of this patchy work. Terry Gilliam and crew, full marks; Hector Berlioz, see me after class.