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Flight: A strong cast grips your attention in Jonathan Dove’s airport-set comic opera

Entertainingly staged work, receiving its Irish premiere, is inspired by same true story as Steven Spielberg’s film The Terminal

Flight: Ami Hewitt in Opera Collective Ireland's staging of the comic opera by Jonathan Dove. Photograph: Ste Murray

Michael Dungan
Wed Sep 6 2023 - 12:52

Flight

Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire
★★★★☆

Six years before The Terminal, Steven Spielberg’s movie starring Tom Hanks as a refugee living rough in an airport, there was Jonathan Dove’s 1998 comic opera Flight, both inspired by the same true story. The opera received its Irish premiere on Tuesday night courtesy of Opera Collective Ireland.

The inspiration behind the movie and opera is the late Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who was absurdly trapped by red tape into living for 18 years in a passenger terminal at Charles de Gaulle airport, in Paris. Compared with the movie, the opera uses him more as a framing device for telling the stories of the passengers and other airport users whose lives interconnect with his. They are all nearly always on stage together throughout.

It’s great fun. The pacy, Neil Simon-esque libretto by the playwright April de Angelis brings out the laugh-out-loud comedy in the day-to-day hurt, disappointments and tensions of human relationships. Although sincerity and satire sometimes blur a little, there is an overall sense of affectionate observation.

This is perfectly matched in the energy and wide-ranging colours of Dove’s score, vibrant and nicely balanced in the playing of the Irish Chamber Orchestra under the conductor Wyn Davies. It is prevailingly up-tempo and swift, with recurring motifs associated with different characters or airport realities, and laced with hints of Benjamin Britten.

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Under Stephen Medcalf, the production’s director, a strong ensemble cast grips your attention as the stories unfold within the overarching narrative of people thrown together in a departure lounge. The countertenor Eoin Conway is dramatically and comically natural as the Refugee. Dove’s best music for the role – and Conway’s highlights – occur in the series of duets where he offers magic stones as comforts to different women, and, in one of the opera’s only entirely serious passages, the long solo describing his original tragic journey.

The tenor Christopher Bowen and the soprano Roisín Walsh are all tension and best intentions as a married couple hoping a foreign holiday can reignite their passion. The mezzo-soprano Anna Brady and the baritone Eoin Foran brandish a cheeky chemistry as young flight attendants unable to keep their hands off each other. The mezzo Deirdre Arratoon impressively walks the line between comedy and poignancy as a woman whose midlife crisis has her waiting at the airport for a fiance who may or may not exist.

The final couple are the baritone Jolyon Loy and the mezzo Carolyn Holt, as young marrieds expecting their first child and departing for a diplomatic post in Minsk. Holt, whose character baulks at the last minute and misses the flight, stands out in what seems to me the opera’s most complex role. But still very funny.

That leaves the god-like Controller, the coloratura soprano part sung with ease and convincing haughtiness by Ami Hewett, perched above and looking down disdainfully on the human frailties below. The way her lofty post opens and closes to view is the one sophistication among Maree Kearns’s otherwise minimalist designs and costumes, which, combined with Kevin Smith’s subtle lighting, simply and perfectly evoke what is for all of us a familiar setting.

Flight continues at the Pavilion Theatre tonight; at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway on Saturday, September 9th; and at the Everyman, Cork, on Tuesday, September 12th

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