Cardiff. (International).(Opera Review)

Back in 2000, Welsh National Opera became the first British company to stage a production by Catalan director Calixto Bieito, with a Cosi Fan Tutte that was not hugely liked. Next he was taken up by English National Opera, first with Don Giovanni, then with Un Ballo in Maschera, both of which were mauled by most critics. In September, he returned to Cardiff's New Theatre with his version of Die Fledermaus--a piece that many of us considered a lightweight entertainment with an effervescent score. Apparently Bieito thinks we are wrong.

A few quotes from an interview with the director that appeared in the program book: "Adele is a typical Viennese character--a working-class woman whose life could easily fall into prostitution.... The question of prostitution, and how closely it matches the activity of the women in this opera [sic], is an important one.... Champagne in the world of the operetta is a hard drug.... The society shown in the opera [is] one which produces suicide and hysteria.... My original intention was to set the whole opera in a prison.... A production like this is a warning."

Well, perhaps it is, though not necessarily in the way Bieito intends. But to specifics. The operetta (Bieito largely avoids the term) was played in one set, based on the stylish black-marble music room of the Palais Stodet (1911) in Brussels, the work of Viennese Secessionist Josef Hoffmann. In Act I, when it's supposedly the Eisenstein residence, it's treated as an old-fashioned gentlemen's club, where a number of males doze in armchairs, rising occasionally to paw at the passing Adele. The central action plays before them. Act II, Orlofsky's party, descends into an orgy as the guests start to peel off their clothes at the "Bruderlein" ensemble. For the Act III prison scene, we're still in black marble surroundings, and the Frosch scene has been cut, "as it has always struck me," says Bieito, "as being not very effective as comedy."

It's fair to say that there was a good deal of laughter in the house on September 25, though it thinned out as the evening wore on. Quite a few people laughed at the many four-letter words in the new dialogue, the work of the playwright Mark Ravenhill (author of Shopping ...