Guillaume Tell, Royal Opera House **

I rarely feel as angry as when I emerged from Guillaume Tell. It wasn't because of the now- infamous gang rape scene. Yes it was childish and unnecessary but it wasn't the most obtuse thing I have ever scene at the theatre. In fact, I was angry at Antonio Pappano. Pappano for me has always been the face of opera. His enthusiasm and charisma enabled me to fall in love with this extraordinary art form. In Tell, you can feel that charisma and excited energy injected in the orchestra through his brilliant conducting. Therefore, how could he stand aside to let a protentious child ruin one of the best performances of Rossini's grand opera. The moments when I closed my eyes, I was in heaven yet the moment I opened them I was transported to hell. If the standards of the music quality wasn't so high, I wouldn't have left so enraged but Finley's Tell is powerful yet emotional; Osborn's Metcalf transforms from devoted love to devoted soldier so well; Byström's Mathilde is delicate and heartfelt. Therefore it is up to the director to make a true mess of things. There is a potentially interesting idea of rebirth and a country uprooted with the idea about the tree that could be incorporated into a production. However, that production becomes thin on the ground when you rely on this idea to last four and a half hours. Any production needs both light and shade and if, in the case of this production, there is no light, the shade becomes dull and tiresome. Damiano Michieletto's direction does nothing interesting other than one moment of trying to shock an audience before presumably being made to tone it down so significantly that it becomes insignificant. The use of video is poor. Look to Es Devlin to be shown how to incorporate multimedia into a production instead of just turning the Opera House into a cinema for something that is of no real importance. This is certainly a production worth listening to although it is a shame that the abismal aesthetics let it down.