In Da Ponte and Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni we witness the last day of a man’s life, in which he experiences a vertiginous fall towards the inner and scary depth of the human nature, something that makes him ‘one of us’, a shady side to which audiences could connect at the time of the original performance and still can today: the hell of loneliness and doubt, the punishment of cynicism and despair, the terror of dependence on feelings that one can’t reciprocate. A man named ‘Giovanni’ can be any of us and we all have a bit of him in us.

What makes Don Giovanni so irresistible to women as different from each other as Donna Elvira, Donna Anna, Zerlina and all the other women in Leporello’s catalogo?  Don Giovanni is seductive because he is classy, lonely, tired, narcissistic, generous and violent, contradictory and human; he is not a faultless hero, and this acts like a magnet drawing all other characters and all audiences inevitably to him.

In my staging of Don Giovanni we will use historically informed acting techniques in an attempt to reveal the full original expressive palette of all the characters, without attempting to propose a museum-like rendition of this masterpiece. Different sides of the female nature are portrayed in Donna Anna, donna Elvira and Zerlina and as many different aspects of the masculine sensitivity appear in Don Giovanni, alongside Leporello and Masetto. Is Commendatore’s voice really coming from the underworld, is the statue really coming to life, or is Don Giovanni rather finally coming to terms with all the rules he has broken and realising he can’t go any further?

Don Giovanni is like a kaleidoscope in which the human nature is portrayed with its many contrasts and enigmas, and at Confidencen we will try to highlight the simplicity of the mechanisms of eighteenth-century opera and come as close as possible to the lighting conditions of the original historical performance, where the audience was not separated from the stage by the ‘fourth wall’, like they are in modern performances. In this condition, I hope that the humanity of all the characters will express its full potential and  every spectator will bring a token of the opera home with them.