If you had been fortunate enough to see the first night of Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin at the Opéra National de Paris last week, then it might have been with a slight jolt of surprise that you saw a familiar face take to the stage as the cast took their bows. 

Ralph Fiennes, the award-winning actor, was not appearing in the opera – although he took on the role of Onegin in a 1999 film that his sister Martha directed – but instead he made his operatic directorial debut with the production. The reviews so far have been mixed rather than laudatory. The Times suggested that ‘the lingering feeling you’re left with… is that all this top talent would have benefited from a firmer directorial hand’, while Opera Now’s critic declared that ‘I could happily have watched the whole thing all over again’. 

In any case, the high-profile nature of the staging, thanks to its director’s celebrity, means that it is a guaranteed sell-out over its brief run. While it might well transfer to the Royal Opera House or to the Met, Fiennes will soon be on to his next project with the air of a man who is perpetually in a hurry, like an unusually refined version of the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. Rather than fretting about his ears and whiskers, Fiennes displays a rare degree of taste and intelligence for an actor that has seen him pursue perhaps the most interesting career of any thespian working today.  

The past couple of years alone have seen him take on a mind-bogglingly eclectic........

© The Spectator