Orfeo ed Euridice

Theatre Royal, Glasgow, run ended

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, March 3, 5, 7

Reviewed by Alan Morrison

As might be expected when Scottish Ballet's former artistic director Ashley Page comes back to town to make his Scottish Opera debut, this is a show that offers as much movement for the eye as melody for the ear. In musical terms, this particular production is based on Gluck's simpler original opera of 1762; in dance terms, however, it lifts the full versions of the Dance Of The Blessed Spirits and Dance Of The Furies from the composer's 1774 Parisian revision.

Both creative decisions are successful in their own right. Much can and will be written about Scottish Opera's reduced budgets and necessarily pared-back productions, but here the three-person cast and smaller chorus find a human intimacy in the well-worn myth of a husband forced to hell and back to rescue his recently deceased wife. Australian mezzo-soprano Caitlin Hulcup, pure heroism in an all-white suit, is particularly charismatic when singing Orfeo's wounded arias.

Page is on surest footing, however, when choreographing his dancers rather than blocking his singers. The sequence in the Elysian Fields which opens Act II arrives like a breath of fresh air, with spring greens in the colour scheme, a beautiful flute melody wafting from the orchestra pit and a lightness of step to the dance.

If there's a problem, it's with the production and costume design by the late Johan Engels. The stage is dominated by a central perspex cube that revolves without adding anything to the themes, becoming a clunky and little-used inconvenience in the second half. And if it seems to have emerged from a low-budget sci-fi show, the costumes also make no clear statement on the mythology of the piece.

The Furies send a knowing nod to the bikers in Jean Cocteau's 1950 film Orphee, although here their red-splattered leathers and glowing helmet eyes render them more disturbing and insectoid. Beside them, the ranks of the tattered Lost Souls seem to have drifted in from a zombie adaptation of Les Mis. Elsewhere, the design aesthetic draws again from 1950s cinema, with Amore (Ana Quintans) particularly glamorous in her polka-dot pink skirt. Is she, perhaps, the embodiment of the 20th-century goddess of the silver screen, worshipped by the earthbound masses, and as guilty of celebrity whims as the old gods who rule that Orfeo must not look back at his wife or he'll lose her forever?

It's a possible interpretation, but one that isn't taken any further by a production that's musically delightful and wonderfully danced, but in need of a distinctive and coherent vision of its own.