Mozart’s most glittering social experiment arrives at the London Coliseum
ENO’s production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte returns to the London Coliseum. ENO (English National Opera ) performs all its operas in English so audiences can understand the drama directly without linguistic barriers. ENO has had more new productions of Così fan tutte than any other Mozart opera, with good reason. There is something faintly disreputable about Così fan tutte, and ENO has the good sense not to disinfect it. Mozart’s most glittering social experiment arrives at the London Coliseum dressed as a mid-century pleasure park, all Coney Island lights and whirring amusements, as though fidelity itself were a sideshow attraction that might be won with sufficient nerve.
Phelim McDermott’s production, first seen more than a decade ago, remains durable. The production starts strong with a comedic tone. The performers hold up cards to set up the audience’s expectations. Its fairground frame does not so much update the opera as expose it. Così is all about spectacle: men in disguise, women performing virtue, a philosopher pulling strings. By relocating the action to a world of rollercoasters and carnival barkers, McDermott literalises the emotional vertigo. Love becomes something ridden for thrills, tested for endurance, abandoned when the ticket runs out.
ENO’s insistence on performing in English clarifies the cruelty. Da Ponte’s libretto, when understood in real time, is less a romp than a controlled demolition of romantic certainty. The recitatives crackle with calculation; the ensembles bloom with doubt. What emerges is not a comedy of manners but a study in mutual surveillance. Everyone watches everyone else. The audience, implicated, watches too. The Irish soprano Ailish Tynan stole the show as the hilarious maid Despina. Despina is pragmatic and holds cynical views on men, advising the sisters that soldiers are fickle and that they should “enjoy life” and Tynan captured her perfectly.
Musically, the evening moves with a tensile brightness. The orchestra leans into Mozart’s mercurial shifts from silk to steel. Fiordiligi’s great aria does not simply scale its impossible intervals; it climbs them like a woman scaling the walls of her own conviction. Dorabella, warmer and quicker to yield, feels less frivolous than pragmatic. The men, so confident in their wager, shrink in proportion to their experiment. Don Alfonso, smiling, presides like a maître d’ of disillusion.
What lingers is not the carnival colour but the aftertaste. When the disguises fall away and the couples reassemble, the fairground lights glow with a slightly harsher wattage. One senses that nothing has been restored, only rearranged. The rollercoaster returns to its starting point, but the riders have learned the drop.
ENO’s Così does not argue that “all women are like that.” It suggests, more bleakly and more truthfully, that all of us are susceptible to performance when love becomes a test. In a house as large as the Coliseum, the opera’s final ensembles can feel almost symphonic. Here they feel intimate, as if the carnival has closed and the mirrors remain.
For dates and tickets, see here: Così fan tutte tickets and schedule at ENO’s official site (London Coliseum, 6–21 Feb 2026)