Turandot

A banquet in serious disrepair. Guests loll tiredly across tables draped in torn and tattered tablecloths, candles leaving thick trails of wax behind. Scottish Opera's Turandot arrives in a dark, rotted grotesque that is timed expertly for the autumnal festivities. As the crowd stirs, another failed suitor awaits his execution.

Turandot emerges in a vast green-and-white dress, her red-and-white painted face resembling a peacock in full plume. Ping, Pang and Pong, her Chaplinesque administrators, try to dissuade Calaf from following suit, while her ladies-in-waiting are painted up like the inhabitants a deranged travelling circus.

Trine Møller's soprano as Turandot is luxurious and silky, an intriguing contrast to her character's brutality. Hye-Youn Lee's Liù is the evening's emotional high point; her refusal to reveal Calaf's identity under torture is sublime, both vocally and dramatically.

The set's broken, hole-ridden walls suggest a once-grand court, its power now visibly ebbing, as though the place has waited too long for something to happen. And by Act Two, that stagnation has become bureaucratic routine with Ping, Pang and Pong shuffling papers through another execution, while Emperor Altoum is satisfied that his holy sceptre still drips with blood. The production highlights the fascist undertone well here; violence being reduced to the everyday business of government.

The grotesquerie occasionally gets carried away with itself. In the opening gloom, faces are difficult to make out; later, white gloves glowing under ultraviolet light and a coffin with a head poking out can push the macabre towards Halloween fairground. Though more frustrating is the lack of development in this world. While Sir David McVicar's Turandot is nothing if not confident in its aesthetic, Puccini's shifting locations are largery reduced to one parlour room.

That said, with the tables cleared, the space between Calaf and Turandot opens out and gives their tentative affection room to breathe. As the orchestra builds into Nessun dorma, the harps and horns pull the music out of the pit and across the Festival Theatre, while the offstage chorus haunts the auditorium, lending Puccini's promise of dawn a ghostly quality.

Turandot by Scottish Opera, Irish National Opera. Credit Scottish Opera.