Pasqual€

Samuel Beckett Theatre, TCD

Opera Theatre Company's new production of Donizetti's Don Pasqualepresents a money-obsessed evening. Designer Aedin Cosgrove has chosen a graphic design built around the Euro symbol for the floor of the stage. Pasquale, a banker in this production (which has been re-named Pasqual€), has a nightmare in which banknotes dance around him and try to force him into a coffin. Money also flutters out of the heavens and lies around apparently unnoticed and unwanted for protracted periods. Yet, contrariwise, bundles of notes and bars of gold are regularly filched from Pasquale's safe.

Donizetti may have thought his Don Pasqualewas a comedy but director Annelies Miskimmon knows otherwise. She sees it as a moral tale about greed. And Pasquale, who is caricatured as a kind of sloven, is not the only one to be corrupted by his hunger for dosh. Everyone around him is too.

The problem is that the ideas are all a bit too stark. Norina is a widow. It’s not her first time around the block, and she knows how to deceive men like Pasquale. So she has to be a predatory vamp, save when she’s masquerading in a nun’s habit to convince her prey of her timidity and biddability.

Ernesto is a wimp, pure and simple, so pure and simple, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine anyone, let alone Norina, falling for him. And Ernesto’s problems don’t stop with his characterisation. He grates even more in Norwegian tenor Fredrik Akselberg’s performance, because of the frequency with which he sings off the note.

Martin Higgins’s Pasquale is stock, threadbare buffo, often struggling to communicate the words of David Parry’s English translation with any clarity.

But the production does have some genuine saving graces. Claudia Boyle's Norina is a vivacious presence, fully up to all the trashy behaviour that's asked of her – some of costume designer Ann Conmy's outfits seem to have come from the wardrobe of Rose in Keeping Up Appearances.Boyle sings with a stylish vivacity to boot, delivers bravura passages with, well, bravura, climaxes with some thrilling high notes, and does it all with musical style and panache.

The nine-player ensemble, headed by Bogdan Sofei and Ingrid Nicola, the violinists of the ConTempo Quartet, plays for conductor Roy Laughlin with appropriate zest, and manages the orchestral reduction with the balance of orchestral nous and chamber music sensitivity that such reductions demand. And the two smaller roles of Malatesta (Andrew Ashwin) and the Notary (Nathan Morrison) are effectively done.

On tour until March 12th