Scottish Opera: Falstaff
Scottish Opera are very lucky that the busiest opera producer in the world David McVicar is a Glaswegian and the pandemic has seen him at home in Glasgow rather than attending to his many productions overseas. This has given him time to work on this new production of Verdi’s ‘Falstaff’, a production which is going to be shared appropriately with Santa Fe’s open air opera house but also in a Edinburgh Festival production at the Festival Theatre with a small socially distanced audience.
Scottish Opera have overcome the challenge of the pandemic by staging the opera in a large tent in the car park next to their production shed at Edington Street, Glasgow. The orchestra were placed undercover in the shed with an open door where you could just see the conductor, Stuart Stratford, but the music and the singers were amplified from the large stage. Now we should be clear this was not the quality of sound you would get in an opera house. It was clear but perhaps a little metallic and it was loud, at times very loud! I spoke to an audience member at the interval who admitted she used ear plugs to diminish the sound, and I who use very expensive hearing aids, at times found it a little painful. Also the seats were very uncomfortable, and the tent was open at the side (presumably to blow away the virus), and the seats socially distanced, so it was cold and lacked the excitement of a full opera house.
Having said all that, this was theatrically the most exciting ‘Falstaff’ I have seen in over 50 years of opera going, and it was pretty good musically too. The design, also by David McVicar, was a simple but highly effective set of stairs and a balcony on the stage allowing the large cast and chorus to perform at different levels and with rear doors opening onto a woodland behind, where Falstaff could be dumped or the giant oak could slide in for the last act. You could almost imagine you were in a wood in Windsor rather than a car park in Glasgow. At the first interval I heard two blackbirds responding to the music by providing their own musical interlude, the magic of open-air opera! ‘Falstaff’ is of course an opera with a lot of comedy and some tragedy and McVicar directed the business very effectively, from the opening scenes at the Garter Inn to the final ensemble in the woods, aided by a great cast who exploited the comic elements of Shakespeare, in particular Jamie MacDougall’s very Scottish Bardolph.
Vocally this was also a very good ‘Falstaff’, beginning with Roland Wood who was an excellent Falstaff with a fine baritone which conveyed the humour but also the pathos of the fat knight. Elizabeth Llewelyn was a superb Alice Ford, Sioned Gwen Davies a good Meg Page and Louise Winter an entertaining Mistress Quickly. Alister Miles was a very fine Pistol and Jaimie MacDougall a very good comic Bardolph. The young lovers were very well sung by Gemma Summerfield as Nanetta and Chinese tenor Shengzhi Ren, who was a very good cover for Fenton the night I was there. There were no weak parts in this production with Dr Caius well sung by Aled Hall and Ford by Phillip Rhodes. Stuart Stratford kept the distanced and amplified orchestra well in line with the action on stage. The costumes and the puppets were excellent and the great oak sliding in from backstage was a coup de theatre.
So it wasn’t quite opera as we know it, but it was live, it was fun and it is well worth seeing. It plays in Glasgow till July 17th and then comes to Edinburgh for the Festival from the 8 to the 14th of August at the Festival Theatre. It will be interesting to compare and contrast the performances, the opera house will produce a different sound but with only 300 in the audience instead of 2000 normally it again will be different. So well done Scottish Opera for taking on the pandemic and winning, but I do hope that we can soon return to normal!
