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Life on the Moon English Touring Opera
Lunar satire … English Touring Opera’s Life on the Moon. Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith
Lunar satire … English Touring Opera’s Life on the Moon. Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith

Life on the Moon review – ETO’s production is terrific fun

This article is more than 9 years old
Hackney Empire, London
Haydn’s little-known comedy is uproariously funny and exceptionally well sung, even if the staging can feel overly busy

“In love and astronomy, falsehood is everything: men can prove anything they want to believe” – words sung by Cecco, the cynical servant to the astronomer Ecclitico in Haydn’s little known Il Mondo della Luna, revived by English Touring Opera as Life on the Moon. Premiered in 1777, Haydn’s comedy, to a text by Carlo Goldoni, is a ribald, pointed examination of the relationships between gullibility, venality, scientific pretension and desire.

Ecclitico cons the miserly old misogynist Buonafede into thinking he has been taken on a journey to the moon, where, the latter believes, women are unquestioningly submissive. In fact, the two men have gone no further than Buonafede’s garden, which has been tarted up for the purpose, and Ecclitico’s aim is to rescue Buonafede’s daughter Clarice from her father’s immuring clutches, as well as to make off with a substantial portion of the old man’s fortune. Scientific fraudulence exposes a deeper world of moral vacuity from which no one is exempt.

Cecco fancies Clarice’s maid Lisetta, and both are schemers on the make. Clarice – herself no demure innocent – consoles herself for her unhappy fate with thoughts of what she will inherit when papa pops his clogs.

Haydn’s Life on the Moon, English Touring Opera at Hackney Empire, October 2014. Richard Hubert Smith/ETO Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith/PR

Cal McCrystal’s hugely enjoyable, if hyperactive production, emphasises the pervasive imagery of artifice and deceit, but buries some of the work’s darker implications behind farce. A newly acquired prologue, spoken by Ronan Busfield’s Cecco, introduces the characters and the diva-like singers playing them, which allows McCrystal to punctuate the first half with theatrical mishaps after the fashion of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off. The fake lunar landscape, populated by bizarre creatures, is weird, surreal and Monty Pythonesque. Uproariously funny at times, the staging is overly busy at others: there are moments when you wish McCrystal would just stop and let Haydn take over.

Purists may object to cuts in the score, which excise a subplot involving Buonafede’s younger daughter and her lover. But what remains is exceptionally well acted and sung: Christopher Turner’s Ecclitico and Jane Harrington’s Clarice display formidable coloratura prowess; Busfield’s pairing with Martha Jones’s outstanding Lisetta is a comic treat, and Andrew Slater is wonderfully lewd and curmudgeonly as Buonafede. There’s energetic conducting, too, from Christopher Bucknall, though the Old Street Band, in the pit, could do with a few more strings than will fit comfortably into many of the venues to which the production will tour. It’s not perfect, but it is terrific fun.

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