OPERA Relic of Regency The Duenna
ENGLISH TOURING OPERA, LINBURY STUDIO, ROYAL OPERA HOUSE, COVENT GARDEN
November) with two true-Brit pieces: Alexander Goehr’s new King Lear-based opera Promised End, and this curiosity –the 1775 collaboration between Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his musical in-laws the Linley family, which was so successful that it kept the Covent Garden box office ticking over for 60 years; Byron called it “the best opera ever” and it was the soundtrack to late Georgian and Regency London. This is its first proper revival for 230 years, and is part of a little Sheridan renaissance with Peter Hall’s pro- duction of The Rivals and Deborah Warner’s School for Scandal. The play itself is a standard, if ornate, com-
E
media-derived double plot about young love outwitting aged avarice: two girls, Clara and
nglish Touring Opera is living up to its name in this season’s tour (until 27
Plenty of good one- liners: Nuala Willis and Richard Suart in The Duenna
It’s a pity that Michael
Barker-Caven doesn’t trust the singers he has, and directs as though he expects
school-play performances
Louisa, elope from their Seville homes to avoid having to go through with unsavoury marriage plans. Some nifty cross- dressing helps Louisa have her duenna married off to the old Jew (here “P or tuguese”) Mendoza intended for her, and get together with her
true love, Antonio, while Clara disguises her- self as a nun in order to thwart her own father’s plot and hitch up with Ferdinand.
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30 | THE TABLET | 13 November 2010
It’s Molière and the Barber of Seville rolled into one, with some satire directed at the Church and other familiar targets, and plenty of good one-liners. A couple of years earlier, Sheridan had himself eloped with Elizabeth Linley against both their families’ wishes; clearly Thomas, Elizabeth’s father, melted in the interim, and he and his 19-year-old son Tom – friend of Mozart, great white hope of English music, who drowned tragically at the age of 22 – provided a mixture of new songs and revamped folk songs and ballads for their new relation’s piece. These days, happily, our music colleges try hard to make their students into proper stage creatures, and the Gilbert and Sullivan tradition trains people on the job, so you’d think a piece like this could be cast pretty easily. It’s a pity that Michael Barker-Caven doesn’t trust the singers he has, and directs as though he expects school-play perform- ances; at times it feels like a vastly over-extended French and Saunders-style costume drama pastiche, barely a line deliv- ered without a dollop of arch knowingness. And the oldest lag on stage, Richard Suart – veteran of a thousand G&S buffo roles – is allowed to overact wildly, shout and windmill through the main role of Louisa’s father in a panto parody.
When Sheridan’s glittering wit isn’t being bludgeoned to death, some of its subtlety struggles through, in the performances of Damian Thantrey, Nuala Willis and Adrian Thompson, who invests even the ridiculous Mendoza with a degree of human pathos. First night at the Linbury was a raggedy per- formance, some of the dialogue hobbled, the band and singers out of sync, but little tweaks of timing can make a vast difference and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t get at least a glimpse of what Byron (no great opera fan or connoisseur) was on about as the tour goes on. The songs, too, are cute, one degree more demanding than The Beggar’s Opera, and sweetly orchestrated; Adam Wiltshire’s lovely designs – latticey cut-outs of Baroque architecture, nicely lit by Guy Hoare – set the scene for what should be a joyous spot of time travel to a London which wore its lack of innocence rather more insouciantly than it does now. Robert Thicknesse
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