Camden Fringe Review: The Barber of Seville, Opera Kipling ★★★★

Rossini gets a Mod makeover at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, sung with real strength close up

Opera Kipling were formed in 2019 by a group of young professionals with a mission to bring accessible, up-close opera to audiences across the UK. Their slogan is “Smart and sassy Opera for all”, and they describe themselves as a company challenging past conceptions of how engaging the artform can be, one modern production at a time. This is all work worth valuing, and it shows in the choice of piece.

Rossini‘s Il barbiere di Siviglia was written in 1816, based on Pierre Beaumarchais‘s 1775 comedy Le Barbier de Séville. Its first night was a flop, with a hostile audience heckling the performance, but from the second night onward it has been a comic opera favourite: mistaken identity, cunning plots, love letters, and a woman determined to marry the right man. It is full of speed and silliness, with a score that is genuinely enjoyable and recognisable even to people who think they don’t know any opera. Almost every Looney Tunes round-up includes the Rabbit of Seville, so the tunes are more familiar than audiences might expect.

That newcomer-friendliness is exactly what Opera Kipling trade on, and the plot is light and frothy enough that no one need feel there’s a gatekeeper standing between them and understanding it. That said, my young adult son was one of only two young adults in the audience on the night I went. The crowd definitely leaned toward those who already looked like they had access to opera. It would be interesting to know whether the demographics vary on other nights.

The production relocates the action to a swinging 1960s music hub, all bold colour and youthful independence, with Almaviva reimagined as a Mod-styled pop star trying to win Rosina’s heart from under the nose of her overbearing guardian Bartolo. Costumes drew their colour and pattern from the era, and the whole staging was appealing to look at. That said, the 1960s setting didn’t entirely ring true for me. Laura Curry‘s Rosina gives us a small snippet of The Kinks‘ “You Really Got Me“, which amused the crowd, but in the actual 1960s I’d hope she’d be more likely to run off and join a squat than agree to a hasty alternative wedding. The plot is silly and accessible enough as it stands; I’m not convinced it needed relocating at all, or if it did, a less specific time period might have served it better.

None of which gets in the way of Alexander Jones‘s Figaro, who bursts in announcing “Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!” and explaining that he is everybody’s indispensable man, the barber, fixer and matchmaker, general Mr Everything. Jones is agile and energetic but also commanding, and gets Figaro right into the middle of everything when, as my son observed on the way home, “he could have just kept out of it”. Jones’s scheming is infectious enough that we’re glad he hasn’t. There’s real gravitas in there alongside the comic timing, which is a harder trick than it looks in a role that could easily tip into pure clowning.

Robert Tilson is very appealing and believable as Count Almaviva, a proper 1960s LP-cover pin-up. Massimo Modoni’s Don Bartolo is the performance I’d point people toward: he fully embraces the role’s pompous, ridiculous nature, playing the stock comic figure with real confidence and instinct, so that Bartolo’s absurdity is clear from the moment he appears. He does it with such presence that the rather unconvincing doctor’s costume and props barely register as a problem.

Rosina was the performance I found less immediately convincing, though there was charm and energy there too. A couple of moments in the vocal line seemed to slightly waver but Curry recovered quickly. For me, the bigger opportunity was in the characterisation: I’d have liked to see more variation in her physical and emotional responses as the story develops, more sense of Rosina changing in response to what’s happening around her, rather than a performance that stayed on one note of energy throughout.

What struck me most, though, was the sheer quality of the singing across the board. This is genuinely strong voice work, and hearing it at such close range, in a room the size of Upstairs at the Gatehouse, is a real treat: you don’t often get to sit close enough to a working opera cast to see every expression land. Giannis Giannopoulos, on piano and conducting from the keyboard, was a pleasure to watch in his own right. He was so involved in his playing that he was almost a character on stage himself, and I enjoyed being sat directly opposite him, and observing his fierce concentration as he conducted those rapid-fire ensemble pieces.

The ensemble were uniformly strong and impeccably together in the fast, tightly packed passages that Rossini is famous for. There was evidently some fun choreography in these passages as well, although it was largely performed with the cast in a straight line facing the front. Given that Upstairs at the Gatehouse has around a third of its audience seated to the sides, it might be worth considering alternative formations in future, as varying the staging could allow more of the audience to see and appreciate the movement.

This is Opera Kipling‘s sixth year, and their mission to open up opera to newcomers is one to be admired. I hope they keep at it, and that more of those newcomers find their way to a show like this one.

Images: Lidia Crisafulli

[Thank you to Opera Kipling for gifted tickets for an honest review.]

Booking Details

The Camden Fringe run has now finished, but Opera Kipling take The Barber of Seville on to two more stops this month: Kipling Gardens, Rottingdean, on Monday 31 August at 5pm (£20, via Rottingdean Arts), and Théâtre Basse Passière in France on Saturday 29 August at 7pm (€35, via their box office). Sung in Italian with comic English surtitles, suitable for ages 12 and up.

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