The Barber of Seville, Coliseum, London, review: Full of laughter and confident bel canto

The ENO returns to form with Jonathan Miller's classic production of Rossini's comic masterpiece

Alan Opie as Doctor Bartolo in ENO's 'The Barber of Seville' (Robbie Jack)

After launching its season with a woefully amateurish new Aida, the English National Opera (ENO) has wisely fallen back on its most dependable banker, Jonathan Miller’s production of The Barber of Seville. Now in its 30th year, this show has evergreen charm: if Covent Garden’s version of Rossini’s perfectly constructed comedy is a quintessentially Gallic confection, Miller’s is its equally satisfying provincial-Italian counterpart.

Miller’s trick has been to find a way to give the music’s comedy human shape. Rossini’s art builds with patient deliberation towards crazy climaxes, with the music spiralling upwards with ever-wilder momentum until the intensity of the drama causes the characters to freeze as though in shock: this happens several times and it’s how the first act ends, as the characters realise they are trapped in an impenetrable thicket of deceit.

Rosina’s tyrannical guardian Dr Bartolo wants to marry her, but she falls in love with the handsome Count Almaviva who is (of course) disguised as a commoner; with the aid of ladders, clandestine letters, dropped handkerchiefs, and a blizzard of fake news, the resourceful Figaro helps young love to triumph. The movement style is pure commedia dell’arte, and the cast includes experienced farceurs led with blustering self-importance and perfect timing by Alan Opie (this production’s original Figaro) as Bartolo, and to thunderous effect by Alastair Miles as the turncoat Don Basilio, whose “slander” aria catches the hapless doctor in its endlessly ramifying web; Yvonne Howard in the cameo role of Berta – who alone on stage knows the truth about love – makes the most of her moment in the limelight. Presiding in the pit, Hilary Griffiths extracts an occasionally coarse-grained but always vivid performance from orchestra and chorus.

And the central trio play off each other brilliantly. Soprano Sarah Tynan, an old ENO stalwart, is a Rosina with very sharp claws, whose impeccable coloratura gloriously fills the large auditorium. The Mexican tenor Eleazar Rodriguez, whose sweet tone is as malleable as his physique, and whose multiple personality changes deceive us as much as they do the other protagonists, makes an unusually interesting Almaviva. And in Morgan Pearse we get a commanding and mercurial Figaro whose delicate guitar accompaniment to the lovelorn hero’s serenade suggests he could make that his day-job if he chose.

A finely judged and beautifully designed ensemble production full of laughter and confident bel canto, with its much-loved director coming onstage at the end to take a diffident bow: this is why we should treasure ENO.