If you were looking for a single detail to explain the nature of Tom Hawkes's Castleward Opera production of Rossini's Barber of Seville, you point to the fact that when the singers were taking their individual calls last Saturday, the audience's loudest applause went not to Rosina or Figaro or Almaviva, but to Dr Bartolo.
And in designer Peter Rice's updated 1920s settings, Colin Morris's spat-wearing Dr Bartolo was certainly the most attention-catching feature of the evening.
Like an elasticated cartoon figure placed live on the opera stage, he pranced, simpered and gurned his way through the evening as if he, and he alone, deserved to be the centre of the action. Nobody else handled the patter of Robert David McDonald's English translation with an adroitness or comprehensibility that remotely matched him.
Michael Hart-Davis's moustachioed Almaviva, thin if agile of voice, was unsympathetic enough to make the attraction to Gillian McIlwraith's enamoured Rosina seem implausible. Howard Quilla-Croft's Figaro was altogether more sympathetic, but he generally seemed more carried along by events than masterful of the situations he found himself in. In the more limited opportunities afforded him, Gerard O'Connor's Don Basilio conveyed a greater sense of command.
O'Connor's sense of mastery was missing from the lacklustre conducting of Richard Balcombe who, too often, failed to keep the Ulster Orchestra in the pit and the singers on the stage tightly co-ordinated; and the men of the Castleward Chorus also failed to make a positive impression. For two years in a row now, Castleward's Belfast offerings have fallen well below the not always impressive minimum standards achieved by the now defunct Opera Northern Ireland.
