In 15 years, Mid-Wales Opera has gone from a summer course for students to a venture which can boast of reaching more places than any other British opera company. They settle for the usual small-scale compromises - simple set, 10-piece band, no chorus - but running two alternating casts allows them to undertake an ambitious 23-venue tour after their Newtown-base opening.
Their policy is to go for a punchy production, and director Stephen Medcalf takes that more literally than most. Behind the suave, arrogant hauteur of Don Giovanni is a brute: there is less taking Leporello by the wide pin-striped lapels than kicking him hard where it hurts. But it is this central relationship between philandering master and bullied servant which provides most of the laughs, thanks in part to an English translation which pulls no punches and to the comic gift of Richard Burkhard, who also suggests enough of co-dependency and pimping to give a dark edge to Leporello's buffoonery. Dean Robinson's smooth baritone goes some way to explaining this Don's sinister allure.
Nicky Shaw's single set is ingenious: lobby, landing or rooms of an art nouveau-style apartment block. Of the three tall opaque glass double doors, the central one immediately reveals itself to be a lift, the device which permits the slight variations of scene, but ultimately the fiery fast descent to hell.
There are some deft directorial touches too, as when Simon Wilding's Commendatore, risen from the dead to avenge his daughter Donna Anna (the strong Catherine Mikic), stubs out a cigarette in the palm of his hand. Don Giovanni's subsequent gasp of horror at the Commendatore's icy grip matches the chill factor that Mozart brings to the music at that point and seized on by conductor Keith Darlington.
Mozart gives the best music to the women and, in the generally favourable acoustic of Llanelli's converted cinema, Adele Mason's Donna Elvira managed to be quite affecting in the moments of lamenting her fate. However, Elvira is made to grope Leporello and Don G as though periodically demented and it was hard to be sorry when Elvira is dragged, with everyone else, into the lift-shaft of doom. It doesn't quite work when they then all pop out again, the Don included, for the final moralising chorus, but the health warning againt the eternal seducer is pretty clear.
* Touring until November 8, details midwalesopera.co.uk
