Reviews

Così

“You’re doing an opera!  With just a piano and mad people.” 

At the King’s Head, Islington, a bunch of
lunatics is putting on an opera in a run-down theatre and it’s only the
obsessive persistence of the most dysfunctional of them all that keeps things
going.  Let’s unravel this a little.

Adam Spreadbury-Maher’s latest
production at London’s Little Opera House is Louis Nowra’s play Così, in which the inmates of an Australian asylum decide to
stage Mozart’s Così fan tutte
(overture by Wagner) as a form of therapy. 
Any resemblance to living persons or situations is purely coincidental. 

The play is set in 1970 against
the backdrop of the Vietnam War.  The biggest
problem faced by ingenuous director Lewis (Matthew Burton), fresh from
theatrical dabblings at university, is that none of his performers can sing.  In the case of the bow-tied, shorts-wearing
ex-lawyer Henry (David Price), slated to play the key role of Don Alfonso, even coherent speech is an effort, so the portents
aren’t great.

Nowra’s play is certainly
entertaining and is well put together but relies worryingly on laughs drawn
from the mental illness of its characters, with a generic idea of “madness”
constantly allied to criminality.   Apart from that, there’s a certain
amount of weaving of themes from the opera into the story, with a bit of Art vs
Politics thrown in. 

Burton is excellent as the
cash-strapped (why else would he bother under the circumstances?) Lewis.  He’s a great listener, a rare and
under-valued quality in an actor.

Cameron Harris’s staring,
pill-popping accordionist Zac is good value and Nathan Lang has a frenetic
energy as the pussy cat burning Doug.  Sophie Brabenec raises some well-timed laughs
with her understated timidity and Hamish MacDougall’s double act of nerdy social
worker and right-on back-stabber is nicely judged.

Spreadbury-Maher evokes the period convincingly but overall there’s a lack of subtlety in the performances, with a tendency to generalised loony acting, and the farcical elements of the piece are the
least successful. 

If you’re not looking for anything
too deep and searching, and you don’t live with someone who’s schizophrenic or
bi-polar, it’s an entertaining evening.

– Simon Thomas