The eight works in Opera North's mix-and-match season of one-acters, shared between directors David Pountney and Christopher Alden and designed by Johan Engels, cover a historical span from Rossini to Weill, but the centre of gravity is pitched towards the end of that epoch. The first double bill (pairings change during the tour) brings together works from the first decades of the 20th century - Pountney stages Alexander Zemlinsky's The Dwarf, while Alden is responsible for Manuel de Falla's La Vida Breve.
The Dwarf, (or The Birthday of the Infanta, the title of the Oscar Wilde fairytale on which it is based) may be Zemlinsky's best known opera, but it is by no means his best. It is too self-consciously autobiographical - the beauty-and-the-beast story of the dwarf who is sent as a birthday present to a spoilt princess, and of course falls in love with her, is a thinly disguised allegory of the composer's own fate at the hands of Alma Schindler - who became Alma Mahler- and veers stylistically between a kind of German verismo and Straussian expressionism.
Unfortunately, the production never settles down either. It's rigorously facetious to begin with, full of over-the-top costumes and silly business, as if Pountney doesn't believe in the work either, but then becomes more tragic as the sorry tale unwinds, with Paul Nilon touching as the Dwarf, reinvented as an upper-class twit in white tie and tails, and Stefanie Krahnenfeld is the airhead Infanta, whose words (Pountney's own English translation) are almost indecipherable. Ideally, the work needs bigger voices and certainly a more sumptuous, secure orchestral sound than the Opera North band produced for David Parry.
Dramatically, La Vida Breve may be far less sturdily constructed, but Christopher Alden transforms it into an overwhelming piece of theatre. He switches the tawdry tragedy - the devoted girl betrayed by the faithless lover - from the gypsy quarter of Granada to a Spanish dressmaking workshop of corrugated sheeting and peeling paint. He peoples it with a wonderfully observed gallery of characters, including a male transvestite (Richard Coxon, clearly enjoying his part) straight out of an Almodovar movie. It's a world of menace and casual violence in which every detail of the staging is made to matter, and which turns the pathetic suicide of the central character Salud (Mary Plazas, quite superb) after she is humilated by Paco (Leonardo Capalbo, suitably oleaginous) into a repellent ritual. This really is a company show, pungently conducted by Martin André, and if any of the six works to come in this season matches its intensity, audiences round the country will be lucky indeed.
· Repeated on Tuesday. Box office: 0113-222 6222. Then touring.
