Aida, Coliseum, London, review: not an auspicious start to the season for ENO

Even a flawless Latonia Moore can’t save Phelim McDermott’s am-dram staging

There were moments of haunting beauty – but not nearly enough (Tristram Kenton)

An opera house needs a story to launch the season, and ENO had three. First, their chief executive suddenly announced her premature departure. Second, Verdi’s Aida would be the first chance for their born-again dedication to comprehensibility – diction coaches on hand like firefighters – to be tested; Latonia Moore, in the title role, had said these coaches were “on our ass”, and she had doubts about singing it in English anyway. Third, director Phelim McDermott with his team of Improbables was in charge: could they repeat their visual magic with Akhnaten?

The first scene was not auspicious. Radames (Gwyn Hughes Jones in Ruritanian garb) faced Amneris (Michelle DeYoung in a shapeless mountain of white chiffon); both stood stiffly either side of a curiously ballooning gauze curtain, while her obtrusive vibrato and dutiful but strained diction was answered by his competent but effortful hymn to Aida. It felt like cod-Gilbert and Sullivan, until Latonia Moore came on to remind us what we had come to hear. Other roles were well sung, notably the King (Matthew Best), Ramfis (Robert Winslade Anderson), and the High Priestess (Eleanor Dennis), but what this black American soprano did was raise the whole event onto a different musical plane, with her flawless bel canto and lovely sense of line and phrasing.

Under Keri-Lynn Wilson’s direction, the chorus and orchestra were superb. But what McDermott, founder of Improbable theatre company, delivered was am-dram. Every chorus and orchestral interlude was treated as an excuse to go for broke with a few standard effects – smoke, veils, tumbling, and wobbly human pyramids. Apart from an omnipresent physical pyramid there was no overarching visual concept, while the costumes suggested a democratic fancy-dress party where everyone had been instructed to do their own thing, albeit with Middle-Eastern references.

There were a few moments of haunting visual beauty, notably the pre-campaign temple ritual and the final scene (with the tomb looking like a Baghdad basement), but nowhere near enough.

‘Aida’ is at the Coliseum till 2 December, eno.org