The Barber of Seville, English National Opera review ★★★★★

The programme for my first visit to English National Opera in September 1977 lists nine operas being performed by the company in that month alone, including a complete Ring cycle. ENO’s entire output this season consists of nine productions, all but one revivals. But it’s a miracle that the company has managed to produce even that at such short notice, after ACE announced in 2022 that it was going to kill off the company.

Forced to reverse that decision by public outcry, ACE is now engineering a company move to Manchester, under the guise of 'levelling up'. This also conveniently extracts ENO from the London Coliseum despite the fact that it owns the theatre, a sort of No Fault Eviction by ACE, freeing it up for hiring out to global commercial companies for long-running musicals. A Japanese musical is moving in for four months this summer.

Their livelihoods at risks, members of Equity and the Musicians Union announced a strike for 1 February, a strike which has now been postponed, pending further negotiations. One can only imagine therefore what the atmosphere backstage must have been like whilst the company had to rehearse a sparkling comedy by Rossini.

Simon Bailey as Dr Bartolo and Innocent Masuku as Almaviva. Photo: Clive Barda

With The Barber of Seville, ENO has reached for one of the world’s most popular operas in a venerable, tried-and-tested production by Jonathan Miller which has been in the company’s repertoire for 37 years. Miller’s traditional production sets the opera in 18th-century Seville, the time-and-place of Beaumarchais’ original play, on which Rossini’s opera is based.

The feisty Rosina and the romantic Almaviva fall in love at first sight and the young lovers outwit Rosina’s elderly guardian, Dr Bartolo, who was planning to marry her himself. The icing on the wedding cake is that Almaviva turns out to be a wealthy aristocrat and everyone lives happily ever after. (Well, no they don’t. For what happens next, see Mozart’s sequel, The Marriage of Figaro.)

ENO has managed to assemble an international cast without a weak link. Irish soprano Anna Devin provides pin-point coloratura as Rosina and Innocent Masuku, singing gloriously as Almaviva, is part of the generation of post-apartheid South African singers who are now populating the world’s opera houses. British baritone Charles Rice is the likeable Figaro of the title and two great stalwarts of the opera stage, Alastair Miles and Lesley Garrett, give deliciously fruity performances as Don Basilio, Rosina’s sleazy music teacher, and Berta, Dr Bartolo’s housekeeper.

The chorus of English National Opera. Photo: Clive Barda

(Garrett sang the role of Rosina in this production 25 years ago and she enjoys herself hugely as an unstoppable Berta who delivers her recitatives in a broad Northern accent.) Simon Bailey, who has sung both Figaro and Dr Bartolo at La Scala Milan, plays Dr Bartolo as a three-dimensional character rather than a grotesque buffoon, increasingly engaging the audience’s sympathy on every appearance, whilst not above executing a spectacular pratfall that brought the house down on first night.

American conductor, Roderick Cox, making his UK opera debut, searched for every moment of tenderness in the score with a clear beat that could be seen from the moon. The orchestra, eschewing formal concert dress as part of their industrial action, wore yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “We Are ENO” and played as if their lives and jobs depended on it. They do.

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The Barber of Seville is sung in English with English surtitles. Further performances are on 22, 24, 27 (relaxed performance mat and eve), 29 Feb. Click here to book