Enter the weird and wonderful world of the Richard Jones’s Hoffmann

This February sees ENO bring a major new production of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann to the London Coliseum stage. Following his Olivier Award-nominated Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, Richard Jones returns to ENO to turn his vivid imagination to this fantastical story of love.

The Tales of Hoffmann are interlinked stories of the writer Hoffmann’s loves, thwarted by the jealous muse of poetry, and a sinister nemesis – a multiple role played by the same singer. The opera begins in a tavern where Hoffmann drunkenly recounts the stories of three lost loves.

The first is Olympia, a life-like mechanical doll, who is literally torn apart by her cruel co-creator, Dr Coppélius.

The second is the Venetian whore Giulietta, who meets her fate in the arms of Hoffmann having been poisoned by Dapertutto, the nemesis who intended to steal Hoffmann’s reflection.

Hoffmanns final love is Antonia, a former lover with a mysterious disease which will kill her if she sings: Hoffmann’s enemy, Dr Miracle, offers Antonia’s father a cure for his daughter, but it’s a trick to cause her death and blame Hoffmann.

A Co-production with Bayerische Staatsoper, the production was staged in Munich earlier this year. 

Jones’s staging does away with Hoffmann as the garrulous drunk entertaining his sizzled friends and forces us in to his addled head instead. The major strength of this concept is how cleverly Jones builds unity out of the three acts and Hoffmann’s three women, helped by some suitable-wizard designs and costumes by Giles Cadle and Buki Shiff respectively
The Times, 3 November 2011

A riot of colour and invention, this production features Barry Banks as the lovelorn hero, and young American soprano Georgia Jarman sings all three of Hoffmann’s lost loves – a feat few sopranos today can match.

Click here for more info and to book tickets.