Verdi in Legoland

Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlo presents a mixture of adultery, incest, homoerotic friendship, betrayal, heresy, executions en masse and mutual blackmail between the Spanish royal family and the Inquisition. Some productions stress the struggle of the individuals; some focus on the political element of the plot; others try both. Nicholas Hytner does neither. I must admit that after four hours in the theatre the meaning of the show he put on totally escaped me. First of all, there was no aesthetic coherence: some acts took place in pitch black, nondescript, minimalist sets, while others happened in a bucolic forest, a Lego-like orange monastery and an extremely kitsch (allegedly) Spanish square with a gilded Cathedral and a portrait of Jesus bleeding in the background. Hytner is indeed to blame for the idea and the final result, but not the…