Garden Opera is exactly what its name suggests: a company that tours productions to the gardens of grand country houses. At Aberglasney, whose arcaded cloister garden was hidden for centuries before being restored to its former glory, the Garden principle of digging down to the essential core of an opera seemed particularly appropriate. Director Martin Lloyd-Evans makes the central relationship of put-upon servant and philandering master as blackly comic as could be. When Leporello declares that Don Giovanni is a merchant banker, the expletive is all the more forceful for being delivered not in cockney style but raw, two-syllabled Glaswegian.
This contrast between Peter Grant's mini Robbie Coltrane of a Leporello and Ian Jervis's smooth transatlantic Don works well throughout, notably in the scene where each is disguised as the other (more credible since they share same build and girth), the accents slickly exchanged. It mattered little that the voices were not as impeccable as their timing.
Mozart's fine detail was better served by the women of the cast, with Janet Fairlie a dignified Donna Anna and Yvonne Patrick a neurotic but determined Donna Elvira, whose aria sung from high on Aberglasney's parapet walkway overlooking the platform stage added a valuable emotional as well as physical perspective to the drama.
Anne Bourne's Zerlina was a lovably coarse scouser of a good-time girl whose carousings left little to the imagination, while Ragnar van Linden managed to make her husband Masetto as different as possible from that of his aristocratic Commendatore.
On their tiny stage, which recalls the travelling players of yore, the limitations on design are necessarily stringent, but a large wardrobe that could do for Narnia periodically opened to signify the fate awaiting the serial rapist. As the Don is dragged down, Leporello's other vehement Glaswegian curse rings in the mind: Go to hell! So the action comes neatly full circle and not even the rain can dampen these fiery flames.
· At the Yorkshire Showground, Harrogate (01423 537230), tonight. Then touring.
