Oedipus Rex / Symphony Of Psalms, Playhouse Theatre, Edinburgh

Mummy dearest

We can ignore François Girard's sanctimonious talk about dedicating his production of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex to the victims of Aids. It seemed cheap and exploitative, irrelevant to this award-winning show. But it also hid the real shock of the exercise.

The composer wanted the opera alienated in every sense, the singers in masks, the chorus arranged in formal rows, the characters like "living statues". Yet Girard's version is dazzlingly spectacular. Everything in his production is emotional, vivid, eye-catching. Centre-stage is a heap of grey, ashen, half-naked corpses, the victims of the plague of Thebes, with Oedipus's immense throne atop. The chorus, dressed in black, carry spotlights which they flash in the eyes of the audience. Oedipus is red, Jocasta orange, the Shepherd white.

Eventually the corpses begin to writhe, gesture, and finally to climb over the throne like struggling worms and maggots. The set designer, Michael Levine, was a willing accomplice in this triumphant betrayal of Stravinsky's conception, closely and very ably followed by Alain Lortie, who planned the lighting.

Musically, this performance by the Canadian Opera Company was gold-standard. Richard Bradshaw led his energetic, flavoursome orchestra along a straight and clear interpretive line. His Oedipus, Michael Schade, was a vocal aristocrat, high and buoyant, his pain carrying him into a kind of exaltation. He was allowed only ritual gestures – Girard's only concession to Stravinsky's intentions – but somehow filled them with noble self-revelation.

Ewa Podles, as Jocasta, was that unusual animal, a true contralto. This was a voice of coat-tugging intensity, ferocious in the chest register, breaking across into a regal mezzo that dominated the stage. You couldn't believe that she had hanged herself; it sounded as though she would have hanged everybody else first.

The rest of the cast were mainly domestic singers, and pretty good they were, especially the tenor Michael Colvin as a resonant Shepherd. Colm Feore handled the part of Cocteau's Speaker as well as could be expected; it still feels like a mistake to have the story recited in this way, especially in this age of surtitles that throw the Latin text open to everyone. Since Girard had radically reconceived the whole work, he might have gone the whole way and got rid of the Speaker.

Oedipus Rex is too short to mount on its own. The COC's off-beat solution was to start the evening with a concert work, Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. The piece was well sung, but the effect was spoilt by the appearance, in a semi-legible scrawl, of the names of hundreds of Aids victims on a large screen suspended above the singers. Their terrible fate deserved more respect than to become a selling-point for Canadian Opera, and one was left with a feeling of queasy discomfort.