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JONNY DANCIGER
director-designer
Best
Family
Show
Winner
Edfringe '23
Best
Design
Nominee
Offies '24
Don Giovanni
Company: Orchestra Vox | Venue: St John's Auditorium (Oxford)
English translation by Amanda Holden
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Photos by Ben Darwent
Director & Technical Design Jonny Danciger
Musical Director Hannah von Wiehler
Set Design Christina Hill
Producer Emilia Clark
Assistant Director Maggie Wang
Don Giovanni Charles Styles
Leporello Chris Murphy
Donna Anna Holly Brown
Don Ottavio Alex Gebhard
Donna Elvira Beatrice Acland
Zerlina Laura Coppinger
Masetto Florian Störtz
Commendatore Peter Steer
Director's Note
Staging Don Giovanni presents two major challenges: how to explain a living statue within a narrative that otherwise operates in relative realism, and how to avoid the female characters becoming accessories to tired gags about sexual assault. In this production, I aimed to address these issues through embracing the dark heart of Mozart's opera, drawing inspiration from Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Don Juan Comes Back From The War and Blackadder Goes Fourth.
I set the production in a Southern-Italian town occupied by allied forces in the latter stages of World War II. The female characters - alongside a crippled and embittered Masetto - are framed as residents of this war-torn community. On one hand desperate to clutch onto whatever morsels of joy and companionship they can find, and on another at a global turning point in women's liberty. They capture the real emotional grit. Giovanni, Leporello and Ottavio all belong to an allied battalion stationed in the town, and are characterised by a much more self-aware and absurd comedic style. They view themselves as righteous liberators, their arrogance grating with the dark emotional context embodied by the townsfolk.
With death an unavoidable presence, the graveyard and statue is replaced by a pile of rotting corpses on a battlefield, with the Commendatore's body lying on top. Embracing the macabre enabled an ending which engaged more with the harsh consequences of human suffering than with religious notions of punishment. From laughing in the face of death to screaming in it.
Oxford Alternative Orchestra select the bombed-out urgency of wartime and create something dark, tragic, and queasily hilarious that owes as much to Tarantino and Iannucci as it does to Mozart.
Jeremy Dennis - Daily Info
A rare privilege [...] The bloody and visceral nature of his damnation, where corpses come on stage to tear at his body, is highly impactful, building on the gritty horror-inspired rendition of the scene with the Commendatore’s ghost. Instead of a statue, this production makes a corpse of the departed Commendatore, positioned atop a pile of dead bodies played by the chorus, replete with eerie lighting and a wonderfully ominous sound design [...] Intimate, funny [...] a must-see"
Oxford Opening Night
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