Written for Exeunt
Watching Rufus Norris’ rather cartoony pageant of a production, it’s hard not to think (with one eyebrow raised) that this Don Giovanni has been ‘a very naughty boy’. Norris’ is an interpretation that invites such responses. This is a world where kitsch rules, where love is represented by heart shaped helium balloons, metallic pink for a girl and blue for a boy. It’s also a world in which rakes become rapists; Norris’ is a blunt take on a piece that for all its troubling sexual politics perhaps deserves a more subtle interpretation.
Based on the Don Juan legend, Mozart’s Don Giovanni follows the sexual exploits of the eponymous anti-hero as he sleeps his way down into hell. Here is a deviant to rival Faust, a man whose libidinous longings and salacious subversions provide a cathartic purging for all good God fearing folk.
In the 1800s both men served an Aristotelian purpose but in the modern world only Faust’s desperate search for knowledge is still palatable; Don Giovanni’s own rebellion is now much more problematic. How do you best represent a man who is that most vilified of contemporary criminals – a sexual predator?
Theatre Workbook 