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Go Figaro

29/05/2010

The Marriage of Figaro, May/June 2010

PUBLICATION: New Zealand Listener
REVIEWED BY: Lindis Taylor
WHERE: Opening night, St James Theatre, Wellington

A triumphant production of one of the greatest of all operas.

Around 1990, a provocative book called Opera, or the Undoing of Women, by Catherine Clément, alleged opera was an evil vehicle of male cruelty towards women. She must have forgotten about Mozart. Not only is it hard to think of a Mozart opera where women meet nasty deaths, but it is also hard to think of one where women are no more humane, intelligent, forgiving, perceptive and altogether more successful than men.

The Marriage of Figaro is a wonderful example. A chauvinistic, bullying, arrogant, lascivious and foolish Count, ultimately unsuccessful in his machinations, is comprehensively humiliated by a vulnerable servant, Susanna.

It is one of the greatest of all operas, both as brilliant theatre and as the most beautiful and vivid music, full of popular tunes. It helps that the Beaumarchais play on which it is based is one of the great masterpieces of French literature; such a success in 1784 that its translation to opera just two years later was inevitable.

It's a long and elaborate work, but director Aidan Lang has made just two minor cuts for New Zealand Opera's production. It runs over three and a quarter hours, but I doubt anyone in the theatre was waiting for the end.

I wonder about the relevance of the massive wooden paneling in place of the normal curtain. A cross between a shoji screen and a medieval castle gate, it slides wholly or partially to expose the various spaces. The interior walls, too, slide laterally to form rooms, sometimes revealing two rooms at once, one for the main action, the other for "context".

Set designer Robin Rawstorne's interior spaces are abstract and timeless, composed of large, flat, light-blue surfaces, with a couple of large circular windows. But Elizabeth Whiting's beautiful costumes are of the period (the use of denim is visually inconsequential) and ensembles create a charming Vermeer interior. David Eversfield's lighting is conspicuously helpful.

Yet Figaro speaks in today's language (with idiomatic English surtitles), proving that relevance doesn't demand "updating"; although, for some, the absence of arbour and garden in Act IV is troublesome.

The greatest comic creation is the discovery that Marcellina is Figaro's mother, and Bartolo his father, and the scene is a triumph of wondrous interaction, timing and musical and dramatic virtuosity.

The first scene puts Emma Pearson's perceptive Susanna against the more credulous Figaro of Wade Kernot. Pearson has the greater opera experience, but both capture the essence of their roles. Later, there's the hilarious scene between sworn enemies Susanna and Marcellina (the brilliant Helen Medlyn) as they insult each other, and Marcellina becomes (symbolically) entangled in a sheet.

For Mozart, the lawyer Bartolo is better rounded than he is for Rossini in The Barber of Seville, and Gennadi Dubinsky plays him with telling shock gestures.

Richard Greager, in excellent voice, is a rather genial Basilio. In reality, Cherubino is a subsidiary character, but this trouser role - male part played by female - has such delicious music and a role so suggestive and hilarious that no one would dare cut it. Wendy Dawn Thompson is vocally a little underpowered, but her "Non so più" is artlessly gorgeous, and the total package ravishing.

The Count and Countess are sung by Italian guests, both of whom have performed here before, a fact strangely ignored in their biographies; their roles are strongly sung and vividly characterised. Riccardo Novaro (Belcore in the 2004 International Arts Festival production of L'elisir d'amore) is a lean, self-absorbed and domineering Count; Nuccia Focile (Maria in Simon Boccanegra in 2000) is the long-suffering Countess, but doesn't totally capture the air of sad resignation her music tells.

For opening night, the whole was driven swiftly, with plenty of breathing space, by conductor Lionel Friend, supported by an energetic and accurate Vector Wellington Orchestra and the few but beautifully sculpted and luminous choruses under chorus master Michael Vinten.

Comedy is a serious affair and demands the greatest pains with individual and group movement, facial expression and gesture, and timing. This triumphant production has all that. I don't expect to see better.