The Stephen Joseph Theatre has never ranked among the world's great opera houses, so the idea of Alan Ayckbourn's Scarborough company doing Mozart's Marriage of Figaro on the tiny, in-the-round stage seems as congruous as the Royal Opera having a shot at Absurd Person Singular.
Chris Monks's production, which originated at the New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-Under-Lyme, is a farcical, flippant and vulgar appropriation that graces Mozart's overture with a frenzied Benny Hill sequence in which the Count chases an army of nubile masseuses around his personal fitness suite. Needless to say, if Mozart could have witnessed this presumptuous, frolicking farrago, he would have loved every minute of it. The singing voices may be diddy, the staging may be daft, but there is nothing in this joyous evening that is not purely Mozartian in inspiration.
Most updated treatments of The Marriage of Figaro fall short because we no longer live in a society of masters and servants. Monks's masterstroke is to make the piece a satire on the new professional service industries. Count Almaviva is recast as Roger Le Conte, a randy presidential candidate seeking re-election, so it makes perfect sense that he is surrounded by a coterie of PAs, advisers and personal trainers. And the key player among the backroom team, Phil Figaro, is perfectly placed to sabotage the boss's best-laid plans.
Musical arranger Jonathan Gill's miniaturised score is equally astute. The brief, choral interpolations in the opera are so perfunctory and banal that some scholars assume Mozart only put them there under obligation. Gill turns the first into a braying, presidential election theme and the second into a tawdry, wedding-band number.
Monks sensibly casts the piece with performers who are actors first and singers second, but they all make a decent fist of this challenging music. Dylan Williams's callow Cherubino derivation, Billy Joe, is perhaps outstanding, but here for once the cast distinctions merge into a true, ensemble entity - which is precisely the Marriage of Figaro Mozart had in mind.
· Until September 28. Box office: 01723 370541.
