Verdi Nabucco Opera Holland Park, June 2007 Director John Fulljames Lighting Giuseppe di Iorio

Reviews

... Yannis Thavoris's designs fill Holland Park's wide shallow stage with panache. (Telegraph)

John Fulljames’s audacious staging of Nabucco, also designed by Yannis Thavoris and Giuseppe di Iorio, is unlikely to please those who thought Richard Jones's Macbeth flippant. The overture's graveyard of battered suitcases is familiar enough. But just when you think you're in Lodz, along comes the Babylon Circus Troupe, with a bunch of vicious, combat-ready clowns, and Nabucco (David Wakeman) dressed in a lion suit, on a push-along scooter. Much as many assimilated European Jews dismissed Hitler's torchlit rallies as cheap showmanship, one's first impulse is to laugh. But absurdist as Fulljames's imagery is, the sight of these clowns bullying the terrified Hebrew slaves into a cage is more unsettling than the Holocaust imagery that has been cheapened in previous productions of this and other works. ... Fulljames's use of the wide stage is as assured as his concept is provocative. (Independent on Sunday)