I actually had to check with other publications that this was a professional production, so terrible--really, just awful--was the staging here. I mean awful in the sense of people bouncing off shaking sets, actors awkwardly jumping up and down a set, that kind of thing--church-basement stuff. As an undergraduate production this would have been fine; as something with the ROH imprimatur, this was almost barely recognizable as professional opera. The aesthetic for the production seemed to be the old Splatterhouse game for the Sega Genesis: one character in a Jason jumpsuit, blood spattering over a window in the prelude. At the end all of the cast took turns whacking someone with a hammer, emerging covered in blood.
If you closed your eyes, it was totally different: this was sung beautifully throughout. The poor performers had to act in this thing, though, and I'll say they did their best. But what are you supposed to do, as Oreste did, when you spend most of the third act chained to a radiator, and the entirety of three hours twitching like someone with severe PTSD?
There's this game of chicken, yeah, with modish opera stagings? If you blink--if you think it's garbage--you're unsophisticated; if you play along, you're in. Well, I'm calling bullshit on this whole production, save for the (beautiful) singing. This was less regietheater than Reggietheatre: like, done by your cousin Reggie, who works in pizza delivery and collects knives. An edgy production is not as such a valuable intervention--it can still suck, like this one did.
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