Mozart comes to Cuba

In all its refurbished glory, the Hackney Empire (designed, like the London Coliseum, by Frank Matcham) runs the risk of overshadowing whatever show it houses. Credit, then, to Joanna Parker's set for Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, which more than holds its own, its bright airiness and mobility making a telling contrast to the theatre's more sombre plumage.

Parker and her director Paul Miller have relocated the opera from Seville to colonial Cuba, thus allowing a racial element, which the production fully exploits: Figaro (Rodney Clarke) and Susanna (Donna Bateman), being servants, are black (as are Figaro's parents), while the patrician Count (Andrew Rupp) and Countess (Julie Unwin) are white. The staging carries this extra weight lightly. Perhaps too lightly; a little more political edge might not go amiss.

This production celebrates the 25th birthday of English Touring Opera (ETO), which will take it to 17 venues over the next three months. By now the company knows how to put a show together on a shoestring, and this Figaro has the right ingredients: it's sung, mostly clearly, in English (Michael Irwin's skilful translation, by a young and attractive cast, in a set that is minimal but evocative, and with a slimline orchestra that, under the direction of Ian Page (a Mozart specialist) moves fast when required, but holds back winningly in the opera's more tender moments.

If only the production itself were as well drilled. Too often, bodies are spread across the stage with nothing to suggest that they might actually have something to say to each other; and too much of the humour goes for nothing because the singers have not yet got to grips with matters of timing and reaction.

Perhaps that will come as the production hones itself on tour. Certainly there is the potential, in Clarke's Figaro, a blusteringly selfimportant schemer; in Bateman's Susanna, altogether a cannier creature, and possessed of a clear, bright voice; and in Catrin Johnsson's Cherubino, a detailed cameo of barely suppressed (and cross-dressed) tumescence. Between them, they have the potential to make a Figaro to remember.

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Marriage of Figaro