Opera

Falstaff

40 Edington Street, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

five stars

IT MAY be performed in a tent in the car park of Scottish Opera’s Production Centre by the canal, but there is nothing skimpy about Sir David McVicar’s new staging of Verdi’s Falstaff, a co-production with Santa Fe Opera and destined to be seen indoors at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre as part of August’s EIF programme.

Crucially it has a towering performance in the title role from Roland Wood. I have never heard him sing better, and like all Scottish Opera-goers I have heard the popular baritone lots. He also brings to the fat knight a carefully thought-through amoral hypocrisy in a man secretly rather disappointed in himself. It is a lot like the late Oliver Reed, but extant public figure examples are available.

Wood is far from the only star turn onstage, however, with Phillip Rhodes an equally ambiguous Ford, Elizabeth Llewellyn making a very welcome return to this space as his wife, and Louise Winter a characterful Mistress Quickly. Alastair Miles and Jamie MacDougall are a great double-act as Bardolph and Pistol, as are tenor Elgan Llyr Thomas and soprano Gemma Summerfield as the young lovers, the latter in particularly glorious voice.

McVicar has placed his Shakespearean realisation of Verdi’s adaptation on a symmetrical multi-level timber pagoda that apes London’s semi-outdoor Globe, taking full advantage of the natural greenery behind, including a splashy allusion to that canal. His set is busily peopled from the start, when Falstaff’s over-populated bed is pushed on from upstage, and there is activity on all corners of it throughout, with wordless actors as washer women and gardeners.

The live playing of the Orchestra of Scottish Opera may be piped in from their space next door, with only conductor Stuart Stratford visible to the socially-distanced audience, but the detail and balance of the instruments with the voices (miked-up) is exemplary, not excepting the chorus, placed on either side of the stage.

For all its elements of farce and melodrama, and its unequivocal success as broad, pantomimic entertainment, this is a deeply thoughtful and highly literate Falstaff. Its delights run from Sally Swanson’s wordless encapsulation of the character of Doll Tearsheet (borrowed from Henry IV, Part 2) in the opening scene, to the depiction of the Virgin Queen, Don Quixote and a Plague-Mask physician in the costumes of the masqueraders in Windsor Park in the spectacular finale. The mesmerising choreography of that is a theatrical fugue to match the elan with which the cast pull off the musical one that ends the score.