Gauteng opera updated

The piece is brilliantly updated for a contemporary audience. Sets look like spreads out of decor magazines, with minimalist furniture and stark, white bulwarks combined with huge projected images to create a sense of place in each scene. Each different location is further identified by a label – huge, free-standing letters that spell out “Lounge” or “Garden” or whatever the case may be.

In a further (merited) poke in the eye of purists, the closing curtain between scenes is replaced by a screen on which a full exposition of the action to come is written out. Along with English subtitles above the stage, all of these ideas help to make the production easy to understand, thus overcoming the valid argument about opera being inaccessible to the masses.

The piece begins as it means to continue, with Don Alfonso’s (Douwe Bijkersma) proposition to Ferrando (Phenye Modiane) and Guglielmo (Aubrey Loudewyk) taking place in a locker room – complete with naked cast members climbing into showers in the background). This makes sense, it’s a setting in which boys do tend to be boys, along with the associated silliness.

The set-up remains as silly as when first dreamed up in 1790. Don Alfonse wants Ferrando and Guglielmo to bet against the fidelity of their respective fiancees, Dorabella (Steenkamp) and Fiordiligi (Teto), thus putting them in a position where, if they win a bet, they lose their partners.

The cast do very well, with Teto just slightly ahead in terms of the purity of her singing. Teresa De Wit as the ladies’ meddling maid Despina provides wonderful comic relief – enough so that small niggles such as the (less funny) endless bowing of Ferrando and Guglielmo when in disguise could be done away with.

There are only two issues with the production. The length – over three hours, including the interval – will undo the good work of facets that have updated the piece, and there are many spelling problems with the subtitles that could have been sorted out beforehand.