Music review: Orpheus in the Underworld

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IN THIS new scaled-down touring production of Orpheus in the Underworld, Scottish Opera has taken Offenbach’s famously satirical opera by the balls and squeezed it till it hurts.

Such language is tame in relation to Rory Bremner’s raunchy new translation, much of which is unprintable on these pages, but which delighted the tittering audience in a Glasgow theatre well-used to risqué interpretations of the classics, or the smutty innuendo of traditional pantomime.

Much of it is really quite funny. Eurydice is a wag with Essex taste and Estuary vowels, happy to open her legs as often as her mouth; the Gods are bankers in a London cocktail bar, high in boredom and low in morals; Aristaeus (aka Pluto) is a tasteless sleazebag reminiscent of Rik Mayall as Richie in Bottom; Mars is a stereotypical drunken Scot; and Public Opinion is a walking newspaper representative of the celebrity-obsessed media. The cast seem well up for it, most notably Jane Harrington’s shameless Eurydice and Brendan Collins’ sex-seeking Jupiter. The weakest is Nicholas Sharrat’s Orpheus, but only because his is the one character the production fails to make updated sense of.

At its best, Oliver Mears’s bubble and froth production gives sharp edge to Bremner’s contemporary satire. At its worst it descends into token farce.

The problem is, it’s like watching two different shows. Did we really need Offenbach’s music, which now seems like unnecessary baggage to a play created out of its skeleton? And why is Scottish Opera waiting until more than halfway through the run to utilise the reduced orchestra, which could easily have fitted into the Citizens’ pit instead of the single featureless piano? Was I alone in seeing bits of this production as an unintentional satire on a threadbare opera company?