Music: Gaetano Donizetti
Libretto: Felice Romani
Director: John Wilkie
Donizetti’s opera tends, with good reason, to get performed an awful lot – most recently by Glyndebourne, Wild Arts, and English National Opera – but this version has to be one of the most delightful around. With its vocal opportunities, pleasing melodies, and romcom plot, The Elixir of Love is designed to give an audience a good time, but everything here, especially the singing and characterisation, takes the pleasure dial up to maximum.
Transferred to the entrancing Wilton’s Music Hall, from the Waterperry Festival, which has just had its first season under its new Director John Savournin, it makes for an utterly glorious evening. There is a very Charles Court Opera feel, with superb singing, piano accompaniment, one voice to a part chorus, and a sprightly witty production. So, it’s not surprising to discover that it has been produced in partnership with Charles Court, and that there is an overlap in personnel: not only producer Savournin (who isn’t directing or singing here, although John Wilkie’s production is very much from the same mould) but also Matthew Kellet as an unusually young Dulcamara whose electrifying energy and command of the stage come with a splendid, rich-toned flexible baritone.
Any tenor worth his salt can make an impact with the lovelorn Nemorino – renamed Norman in this very English version – and his famous aria una furtiva lagrima. Xavier Hetherington is vocally superb with gorgeously honeyed, beautifully legato pianissimo singing. It’s a rare and precious tenor who revels in singing quietly, but Hetherington also has plenty of steely strength when more volume is appropriate. Matthew Kellet’s quack Dulcamara, a mad scientist in a charred white coat with a mortgage to pay, is selling cider rather than Bordeaux. Madeline Robinson’s Adina has full command of her elaborate coloratura, but impresses as much with her acting as she realises that she has committed herself to marrying the wrong man.
With no pit between stage and audience, the singers connect with the audience more directly than usual in opera. In this, they are aided by David Eaton’s witty translation and piano accompaniment, which brilliantly manages the potentially incompatible requirements of holding everything together, letting the music breathe, and maintaining momentum. As he concedes in the programme, his adaptation is not a translation of the original that would result in ‘something that sounds like Italian thoughts wearing English clothes’. Rather, it’s a complete rewriting of the libretto to fit an English contemporary setting (plus a nice line in Gilbertian patter). It generates laughs in all the right places –rhyming scrumpy with rumpy-pumpy – and its changes improve the drama. Instead of leaving the death of Norman’s uncle (and his inheritance) as a surprise for Act 2, we have Adina expressing concern early on to Norman about his uncle’s health and suggesting that he should visit him. Instead of a tenor and a soprano, these are two adults who should be together but don’t seem able to get there on their own steam.
John Wilkie’s production has Adina managing a chocolate company rather than owning a farm and combines this with an apple fixation. As well as Dulcamara’s artisanal cider business, apples in ruralcore wooden crates are regularly chucked around (and, when required, deftly caught). Adina isn’t reading Tristan and Isolde, but a raunchy novel with an apple on the cover called Core of Passion. The military are American airmen at a nearby base who rapidly make friends with Adina’s largely female workforce. The tabloid Country Mirror has headlines about the invasion of the village Green (land) which the US wants to ‘make great again’. James Geidt is an amusing, stereotypically American Belcore/Brad. Ceci Calf provides a charming set, with its own maypole that magically lights up when extra enchantment is wanted.
Seasoned opera-goers who like something a little different, as well as those dipping their toes into opera for the first time, will all really enjoy this.
Runs until 19 September 2026
