New dimensions for Donizetti

For their current Opera Theatre Company production of Donizetti's L'Elisir d'a- more, the director/designer team of James Conway and Mauricio Elorriaga have relocated the work to "a remote village in southern Italy in 1936".

The musical arrangement, for an ensemble of violin, cello (doubling guitar), flute, clarinet, bassoon and horn, directed from the accordion by Dermot Dunne, is "adapted to the sound world of an itinerant Italian folk band", and the courtyard scene of Act II now includes an outdoor film screening (showing a motley collection of moviestyle amorous embraces).

Elorriaga's bright yellow, crooked-house set is agreeably full of improbable angles, and Giuseppe di Lorio's lighting makes the most of opportunities for the white, central tree (onto which the films are also projected) to stand out distinctively from the blends on the rest of the set.

James Conway imposes an amount of clockwork-toy movement on his singers, and is clearly intrigued by opportunities for sexually symbolic physical posturing; he clearly also wants to add new dimensions to the idea of having a feather in one's cap, though it's the character who has it (Belcore) who loses out in the end. These are all clearly ingredients for a rough-and-tumble love comedy.

But there's an important one that's sadly missing, as the words in Leonard Hancock's English translation are consistently hard to decipher (even harder if you close your eyes and dispense with visible clues). Part of the problem is the way the cast consistently oversings. The demands of tone-production conflict with the communication of meaning. The Regal Theatre in Clonmel is among the larger venues on this tour's itinerary, but the singing seemed calculated for an altogether larger space.

Elizabeth Woods's Adina is all haughtiness and self-regard, and shows flashes of vocal brilliance in support, though she might as well have been singing Albanian as English most of the time. Iain Paton is equally nimble, a lot more comprehensible, and far more adept at tugging the heart-strings, though he would have been even more successful had his singing been less pressured.

Gerard O'Connor is a reliable, smooth-pated, longbearded, tricycle-riding presence as the potion-dispensing Dulcamara, and Martin Higgins has an interesting hollow gravitas as Belcore. Catherine Hegarty's Gianetta, however, is shrill and not always well centred; Sofia (Mary Edel O'Sullivan) and Luigina (Fiona Murphy), the two friends created for her in the musical arrangement by Vyacheslav Lunyov, Viktoria Lunyov and Kenneth Chalmers, are altogether more appealing.

And that musical arrangement? Well, as an Italian folk band, the ensemble, under accordionist Dermot Dunne, would have scored very low indeed, though this is hardly the fault of the players. As a representation of Donizetti, the new version contained too many alien sounds for my taste, without at the same time having made any real stylistic shift. Strange as it may seem, had it been even less Donizettian, it might have been a lot more successful.

Tours to Town Hall Theatre, Galway, tomorrow and Sunday at 8 p.m.; Hawk's Well Theatre, Sligo, on Wednesday, August 9th at 8.30 p.m.; Ardhowen Theatre, Enniskillen, on Friday, August 11th, at 8 p.m.; An Grianan, Letterkenny, on Saturday, August 12th at 8 p.m.; Market Place Theatre, Armagh on Wednesday, August 16th at 8 p.m.; and O'Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College, Dublin, on Friday, August 18th at 8 p.m.