Miss Fortune – review

Judith Weir's first three operas emerged in fairly quick succession, but 17 years separate the last of them, Blond Eckbert, from her new stage work. First seen last summer at the Bregenz festival, Miss Fortune is Weir's reworking of a Sicilian folktale, which she has turned into a contemporary parable.

Tina's hugely wealthy parents, Lord and Lady Fortune, lose all their money in a stock-market crash. When they head off abroad, she resolves to stay and make her way in the real world. She takes a series of menial jobs – working in a fashion sweatshop, helping out in a burger van, ironing in a laundromat – but each time, the venture ends badly as Fate and his gang ensure her good intentions come to nothing. Eventually Tina decides to confront Fate and they agree a truce; Tina wins the lottery gets reconciled with her parents, falls in love with a handsome young man, and apparently lives happily ever after.

It's harmless enough, but what it all adds up to – that life has ups as well as downs, that the rich will always get bailed out because luck is on their side – is hard to fathom. The real problem, though, is the slightness of it all. Scenes follow like cartoonish tableaux, without real characterisation, or confrontation, and without suggesting a dramatic shape, while Weir's own libretto alternates twee rhyming couplets and inert blank verse.

Even the music is drab and unengaging. Weir's knack of making simple musical ideas appear freshly mysterious seems to have deserted her. Only the short introduction to the second act, rippling through the strings, which conductor Paul Daniel and the orchestra seized upon, is a reminder of Weir at her best, but that is short-lived, and the usual diet of unfocused vocal lines supported by routine ostinato patterns is soon resumed.

Chen Shi-Zheng's production does what it can, in a beautifully lit abstract set by Tom Pye. Having Andrew Watts' counter-tenor Fate accompanied by a posse of breakdancers is a striking idea – and they do steal what little show there is – but even such a strong stage personality as Watts can't do much with what he's given. Emma Bell as Tina might make more of an impression if her words were audible. Jacques Imbrailo is Simon the wealthy young man she eventually goes off with, while Anne-Marie Owens and Noah Stewart play the characters she encounters on her journey, and Alan Ewing and Kathryn Harries camp it up as her caricatured parents. It's a long two hours in the opera house.