ENGLISH Touring Opera’s visit to Bath went from the sublime, Benjamin Britten’s prickly high drama of Andre Obey’s play The Rape of Lucretia, to the “cor blimey”, with a Donald McGill seaside postcard production of Gaetano Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love.

Both operas had modern settings. Lucretia drew parallels with the way in which women today still have to fight off unwanted male attentions and the all-consuming chauvinism of the era of the Roman monarchy 509 BC. The setting for Elixir is a cheep seaside resort, with pealing posters for Tristan and Isolde on the facade of the local theatre and a mobile Fish and Chip van parked apposite.

Under the guidance of director Robin Norton-Hale the story of the happily married Lucretia, Clare Presland, driven to suicide by Kieran Rayner’s Tarquinius, just to please his male ego and underline his authority as a Prince of Rome, is real and unrelenting in its harshness. Jenny Stafford and William Morgan fill the roles of female and male chorus, skillfully guiding us through the complexities of the story. Conductor Gerry Cornelius ensures that the score, originally composed for a chamber orchestra of 13 and eight singers, retains its sharp edgy sound.

The production was faithful to Britten’s conception of the tragic drama. There was an Iago-like Junius from Edmund Danon, whose jealousy of fellow soldier Collatinus’ (Trevor Eliot Bowes) happy life and marriage, sets the tragedy in motion, and two lovely understated portraits of Lucretia’s companions Lucia and Bianca from Rosie Lomas and Jane Monari.

If you left the theatre full of gloom and doom about the state of the world and relationships between the sexes, then a return visit the following evening to see The Elixir of Love would have reversed your mood and sent you home with a broad smile on your face. Here we had a chorus dressed and kitted out like refugees from a cheep charabanc outing, taking every opportunity to give full voice to Donizetti’s fun-full score.

With Timothy Nelson’s self-important Sergeant Belcore on hand to complicate affairs by threatening to marry Adina, and Gianetta, (Rosie Lomas), ever ready to bully her day-dreaming waiter Nemorino, the emphasis was decidedly on comedy rather than vocal prowess.

There are eagerly enjoyed moments when serious music takes over from the farcical situation caused by Emyr Wyn Jones Charleton’s salesman Dulcamara, convincing Tamsanqa Tylor Lamani’s lovesick Nemorino that he has an “elixir of love” that will make Natasha Page’s willful Adina fall in love with him. By and large, however, this score, joyfully presented under the baton of Alice Farnham, encourages more laughter than drama, as Sir Arthur Sullivan’s scores fit WS Gilbert’s satirical librettos. [In the spring ETO will tour with G&S’s The Gondoliers.]

ETO will take these productions to the Queen’s Theatre, Barnstaple, on Friday and Saturday 21st-22nd November, On the following day, Sunday 23rd there is a matinee performance of ETO’s Little Terror in Exeter Library.

GRP

Photographs by Richard Hubert Smith