Seraglio review: An opera from the lost season reimagined as a daringly modern miniseries

In Irish National Opera's hands, Mozart's orientalist singspiel loses the arabesques and makes the move to lockdown Dublin.

★ ★ ★ ★

It is true that what is ephemeral does not stick around for long. Fans of operas and plays know something about showing up before a window closes, seeing a production before its run is finished. It can feel like caring about something with a short shelf life. We also know a thing or two about the hidden power of years ahead, the possibility of someone new taking back up that script, that libretto, that composition. What is ephemeral can return.

Who knows how many of the postponed productions scheduled for 2020 will return, but they all have surviving blueprints that could lead to their recovery. What has been lost for good, however, is the accidental combination of those productions and the contrast of ideas they would have created, the zeitgeist of hits and misses that would have formed. A season has been lost. 

Irish National Opera’s The Abduction from the Seraglio was an anticipated opera from the lost season. Nowadays, the best you might hope from Mozart’s singspiel, a Turkish-inspired orientalist entertainment from 1782, could be a romantic comedy without arabesques, the frolicsome rescue of two women from a Turkish officer’s seraglio (or harem). But the attachment of Caitriona McLaughlin - director of hard-hitting productions like On Rafferty’s Hill and This Hostel Life - and a blurb mentioning sex-trafficking suggested that something more serious was afoot. 

The creative team didn’t let go, and now the opera has been reimagined as Seraglio, an online miniseries, new episodes of which are released twice a week. What could have been an attempt to make one of Mozart’s singspiels politically stirring has instead relocated somewhere daringly funny and modern. The mean, dangerous officer and slave-owner Selim (wry conductor Peter Whelan, as serious as a baton) is found in lockdown in his Dublin home, trying to write a children’s story.  

Despite the jump to online miniseries, McLaughlin continues to base the production on opera logic. The entirety of the first episode is dedicated to the overture. Selim retreats into his imagination and envisions an orchestra (the excellent Irish Chamber Orchestra players) playing a musical piece that starts quietly, before being interrupted by loud passages of military-like music. Through a spectacular feat of conducting, we watch musicians in their separate homes playing together, eventually unifying onscreen as one miraculous ensemble. The Irish Chamber Orchestra, no less than Seraglio, has learned to be flexible. 

Lift the lid off Mozart’s orientalism and it would smell strongly, but there’s a sense of it being comically suppressed in McLaughlin’s subversive production. An outline of Moorish architecture in the opening sequence extends into the arches of the Ha’penny Bridge. Selim keeps his would-be captives in a WhatsApp group called “Abducted Amigos,” (hahaha!) and is tempted during his Ramadan fast by a Turkish Delight chocolate bar. 

The plot begins to move in the second episode, with the kind of lovelorn yearning that shows characters staring longingly at Tinder. The stoic Selim gets lost in the profile of his friend Kanstanze (Claudia Boyle), as the storylines of a romantic comedy unfold, but not without an off-the-wall bloodlust. In a fun, deranged aria, Wojtek Gierlach’s jealous security guard Osmin swears to behead, hang and skewer the South Dublin footballer photographed with the love of his life. Now that’s the kind of savage barbarianism I can get behind. 


Streaming on Irish National Opera's YouTube and Facebook pages.