Joe Hill-Gibbins’ production of The Marriage of Figaro opened at the Coliseum in March 2020 – and then, like everything else in the UK, immediately closed. Five years later, with an almost entirely different cast, it’s finally set for the full run this entertaining show deserves.
You’ll look in vain for much of the upstairs-downstairs tension that made Mozart’s opera, and the Beaumarchais play it was based on, so edgy in 1786, when violent revolution was around the corner. That’s a loss – but in this multifaceted opera, not a dealbreaker. Instead, Hill-Gibbins focuses on the individual characters and the web of their shifting alliances.
