The Marriage of Figaro review – Mozart as hotel farce is sparky but scrappy

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Joe Hill-Gibbins’ production of The Marriage of Figaro opened at the Coliseum in March 2020 – and then, like everything else in the UK, immediately closed. Five years later, with an almost entirely different cast, it’s finally set for the full run this entertaining show deserves.

You’ll look in vain for much of the upstairs-downstairs tension that made Mozart’s opera, and the Beaumarchais play it was based on, so edgy in 1786, when violent revolution was around the corner. That’s a loss – but in this multifaceted opera, not a dealbreaker. Instead, Hill-Gibbins focuses on the individual characters and the web of their shifting alliances.

Easy to enjoy … Mary Bevan, Hanna Hipp and Nardus Williams in The Marriage of Figaro.
Easy to enjoy … Mary Bevan, Hanna Hipp and Nardus Williams in The Marriage of Figaro. Photograph: © Zoe Martin

Johannes Schütz’s set is just a long, rectangular box with four white doors, which rises up for the scene in the Countess’s room and recedes for the garden act, lit in neon queasiness by Matthew Richardson. On one hand it’s a stylishly simple frame that focuses our attention on the characters; on the other, we might be in a farce set in a hotel corridor. You never know who’s waiting behind a closed door, or hiding behind one that’s wide open – but why would it be so scandalous for two of the characters to be caught alone together here?

Still, if there’s little sense of claustrophobia or intimacy in the surroundings, the cast provides it in the way they stand next to each other, too close and too handsy, or crawl around the white walls in physical contortions that seem to embody their characters’ embarrassments. And the jokes land, thanks largely to the clarity with which almost everyone delivers Jeremy Sams’ snappy translation of Da Ponte’s libretto.

Making his house debut, the conductor Ainārs Rubiķis keeps the orchestra sounding warm and fleet-footed, though there are moments when the music’s elastic stretches and doesn’t quite spring back into shape. The cast is led by David Ireland’s exasperated Figaro and Mary Bevan’s almost bullish Susanna, both stylishly sung. Putting on an English accent that’s one part Bullingdon to three parts Victor Meldrew, the US baritone Cody Quattlebaum captures all the Count’s entitlement, but the line of his singing is uneven and some syllables get lost. Hanna Hipp is a sparky Cherubino, her lovestruck song to the Countess a dreamily silly set piece with its own little dance routine. The supporting cast is strong, with stalwarts Neal Davies and Rebecca Evans well matched as Bartolo and Marcellina, Hubert Francis as a wide-boy Basilio and Ava Dodd as Barbarina, all micro-mini and Instaface.

David Ireland and Mary Bevan as Figaro and Susanna in Joe Hill-Gibbins’ staging of The Marriage of Figaro at English National Opera.
Stylish singing … David Ireland as Figaro and Mary Bevan as Susanna. Photograph: © Zoe Martin

Carrying herself like a swan among so many seagulls, Nardus Williams is once again in glorious voice as the Countess, her two arias glowing centres of gravity amid the whirl of the story, though Bevan runs her close in the final act. It’s not a production that’s easy to love, but it’s easy to enjoy.

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