Transported tale of sexuality a late bloomer

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This was published 12 years ago

Transported tale of sexuality a late bloomer

By Reviewed by Peter McCallum

THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO
Opera Australia
Opera House, February 6

At interval, after Mozart's masterpiece of operatic ensemble writing in the finale of act two into which the director, Benedict Andrews, has injected moments of genuine and hilarious farce, there was nevertheless concern this would be just another bad-boy production that baits conservative audience members but ends up a slave to its own orthodoxies, without creating new meaning.

Ingenious set … Mozart's drama of sexual and class politics is moved to a modern mansion.

Ingenious set … Mozart's drama of sexual and class politics is moved to a modern mansion.

Andrews has moved the 18th-century aristocratic setting to a modern mansion in which Figaro is a security guard and Susanna a maid. It is a truism, albeit scarcely mould-shattering, that Mozart and Da Ponte's drama of sexual and class politics is eminently transportable in time and place but when, for example, one asks a modern security guard to sing a minuet (as in Figaro's Se vuol ballare, though done here in English), one risks demonstrating not the work's contemporary relevance, but the opposite.

Ralph Myers has created an ingenious set in which the rooms keep exiting stage right, propelling the pace in sympathy with the momentum of the score.

Musically, this is a strong cast. A highlight of the first half (and of Western music in general) is Cherubino's music, which Dominica Matthews sang with deliciously poised yearning and melodic elasticity, creating, to a tee, a representation of a blushing, sex-obsessed schoolboy. Booing joined the laughter on cue at the halfway curtain, and some seats remained unwarmed by human buttocks for the rest of the evening.

But misgivings turned out to be misplaced. Under the conductor Simon Hewett, voices and score blossomed gloriously in the second half and threads that had seemed capricious came together cogently.

Taryn Fiebig's Susanna is vocally radiant, musically comely and full of theatrical liveliness. In the depth and tonal interest of her final aria she created an expressive highlight. Elvira Fatykhova, as the Countess, partnered her with golden luminosity in their letter duet and her own arias, particularly that from act three, opened out with smooth, well-sculpted lines and dramatic weight. Joshua Bloom's Figaro bustled with energetic bluffness, finding its true focus in act four, where his emotional turmoil was touchingly convincing. Indeed, starting with Jessica Dean's exquisite performance of Barbarina's plaintive cavatina, the production achieved something rare (so rare that some scholars have wrongly pointed to a flaw in the work) by making the fourth act the principal point of dramatic culmination rather than, as so often, a subdued unwinding denouement. Here Andrews transformed the narrative from realism and farce to stylisation with one of his own orthodoxies from his War of the Roses production for the Sydney Theatre Company, a confetti shower, adding it like a tongue-in-cheek personal signature.

The Count, sung with professional force by Michael Lewis, is portrayed as an uncharismatic slave to obsession, prone to pathetic violence trading on power. As a spent version of same, Conal Coad's Bartolo, strapped to an oxygen mask, was aptly apoplectic, while Jacqueline Dark's Marcellina made the transition from discarded older woman to mother with emerging grace. Kanen Breen was witty and vocally suave as Basilio, Clifford Plumpton a roughly hewn Antonio.

In an opera about sexuality, Andrews subtly charted the progression of women negotiating male passion. Young girls twirl streamers, short-skirted teenagers dance, and the line from girl (Barbarina), to bride (Susanna), wife (the Countess), mother (Marcellina) was represented with discomforting edginess, as a young child appears to take the Countess's place just before the curtain. Alice Babidge's design and the clothing rails that bordered every scene reinforced the Countess's line in Act 2 that everything - morality, deceit and display - is merely a change of costume.

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