What kind of opera strikes the iciest fear into the critic’s heart? ‘Contemporary,’ you cry! But no – the answer is operetta: it’s the hope, you see, the fizz, frivolity and lax morals, the wise, loveable idea that serious subjects are best broached through silliness. So often this results in purgatorial evenings that feel as if they will will never end – the worst of them precisely when the cast appears to be having just amazing fun up on the stage. Thus one approaches beloved pieces like Off enbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld with clenched hope and foreboding – particularly when, as here, it is performed by a multi-lingual cast of student operetta neophytes in a mix of sung French and spoken English.
Well, I needn’t have worried too much. The Royal Academy of Music’s production was oddly tentative but eventually reached decent levels of entertainment, though the nervous cast took a long time to get into it, and the routines devised by director Martin Duncan and choreographer Steve Elias were a mite pallid and old-school. I’ve certainly never seen such a decorous cancan, though it went down well with the Hackney crowd (and I hope the college’s peregrinations while its theatre is rebuilt have shown a few new people how high the standards usually are).
It is hard to recreate the wicked scurrility of 1858, and probably wisely, Duncan didn’t try, though I wonder whether Helen Brackenbury’s Mary Whitehouseish Public Opinion, though amusing and cleverly performed, rang many bells with the young ones.