Rossini's overture to The Thieving Magpie has always ranked among the most popular of orchestral showpieces, though some have found the opera it precedes an altogether more uncomfortable experience. Based on fact, it is a probing, angry work that exposes the arbitrariness of human justice and rages against the abuse committed by those entrusted with enforcing the law.
The heroine, Ninetta, is a servant accused of swiping her employers' silver cutlery. The theft is, of course, the work of the eponymous magpie, but some people would prefer it if the girl were out of the way. Her potential mother-in-law considers a servant an unsuitable match for her son. Ninetta is also being sexually harassed by the local mayor, who is consequently threatened with exposure and so is out for revenge. Ninetta is soon the victim of an atrocious legal system that demands the death penalty for larceny. A supposedly happy ending doesn't alleviate the resulting nastiness.
The Thieving Magpie is not quite the masterpiece that some have claimed: the exposition is overlong, and the opera contains an anti-semitic caricature of a Jewish pedlar who unwittingly provides Ninetta's persecutors with the false evidence they need. The best music comes in the second half, where Rossini models his depiction of Ninetta's hellish ordeal on Orpheus's encounter with the Furies in Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice.
Martin Duncan's Opera North production, first seen in 1992, relocates the work to the late 19th century. It begins as a rural idyll and ends as a Piranesi-inspired nightmare. Musically, the revival is hit-and-miss. David Parry's sledgehammer-style conducting is unalluring and some of the cast sing with aplomb rather than ease. Robert Poulton, however, is terrific as the slimeball Mayor and there is a great central performance from Mary Hegarty as Ninetta - a thrillingly sung, wonderfully acted portrait of a feisty woman whose spirit is gradually broken by traumas from which she may never recover.
· In rep until Saturday. Box office: 0113-222 6222. Then touring.
