The Marriage of Figaro

Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin

Opera Theatre Company's new production of Mozart's Marriage of Figarotakes off in a novel instrumental direction. The sextet that accompanies the opera under conductor Fergus Sheil has no string players, and consists of a quintet of wind plus piano.

Mozart has long been celebrated for the particular appeal of his writing for wind instruments, but the instrumental mix offered by OTC (the reduction came from Skylight Opera Theatre in Milwaukee) didn’t actually deliver the benefits that might have been expected, and also resulted in the strange sound, abandoned by most opera houses in the middle of the 20th century, of recitatives being accompanied on a modern grand piano.

Here, there were also recurrent problems of ensemble between the singers and the instrumentalists, some of them undoubtedly caused by the raciness of the production, directed by Annilese Miskimmon.

Adrian Lindford’s designs updated the piece to a time of electric power drills, reel-to-reel tape-recorders and colourful A-line dresses, with a mop-haired Cherubino in a school blazer. Miskimmon’s production style harked back to the slapstick of an earlier era, with all the excesses of redundant physical activity, and fussy handling of entries and exits that implies.

There was also an excess of crotch jokes, and, while the presentation of the countess as a heavily pregnant woman may have made a point about why the count had lost interest in her, it also made for unnecessary absurdities.

This might have been fine had there been singing to transcend the antics. Sadly, there was all too little of that. Against all the odds, Sinéad Campbell-Wallace maintained a core of dignity as the wronged countess. Martha Bredin was a wonderfully boyish Cherubino. And Gabriela Istoc’s Barbarina sang with an almost show-stealing purity.

But all too often this was the kind of evening that depended on the tiredest and most worn out of gags, the kind of things that would have you reaching for the remote if you came across them on TV by accident.

Tours nationwide until June 2