Beforeness

It can take a lot of prodding to get the music group to agree to meeting up for extra-curricular activity. Thankfully, a campaign of regular reminders and hint-dropping worked this time and four of us actually met this evening to go to an opera.

Opera Theatre Company is a wonderfully vibrant company, now in its 25th year. Their productions are always adventurous and exciting, and I have never been disappointed in anything of theirs that I've gone to see. Tonight's performance of Donizetti's Don Pasquale was no exception. I'm no great fan of the bel canto opera style, but I'm prepared to make an exception in the case of comic opera, which the style is so much more suited to than when it tries to be serious and falls flat on its face (I'm known in the music group as being generally uninterested in composers whose names end in -ini or -etti). I'm delighted that I made an exception tonight.

The production took a present-day twist, setting the opera in post-bust Ireland. Add to that topicality an out and out decision to play for laughs and you end up with a wonderful evening in the theatre. None of us could remember attending an opera before where the sound of audience laughter regularly drowned the music. As well as a magical production, some of the singers were quite wonderful too (especially Andrew Ashwin as Malatesta and Claudia Boyle as Norina.

My attempts to ave a bit of a get-together beforehand came to nothing, unfortunately, and I ended up in splendid aloneness in the Lincoln's Inn pub before moving on to the performance in the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Trinity College.