Wild Man of the West Indies, ETO, Hackney Empire, review: 'Donizetti fans will be grateful'

Three cheers for plucky English Touring Opera, which has the daunting front-line task of taking live opera to smaller cities and towns round the country.

Without being wildly experimental, ETO likes to balance standard rep with lesser-known pieces, so for this spring season La Bohème has been matched with the first modern British staging of Donizetti’s Il Furioso all’isola di San Domingo – translated here as The Wild Man of the West Indies.

Although hugely popular in the mid-19th century, this is not a piece that has worn well. The plot, based on the same episode in Don Quixote as the apocryphal Shakespearean play Cardenio, focuses on a nobleman who has fled civilization and lost his wits after finding out that his beloved wife was involved with another man.

Following the style of a hybrid genre known as “semi-seria”, the tone oscillates between low comedy and high tragedy, with a pertly resourceful slave providing light relief. But there are so many reversals and inconsistencies – including a ludicrous suicide attempt – that the characters never engage us, and the music for most of the first act is routine stuff, too heavily weighted towards flat recitative.

^{Sally Silver as Eleonora, Donna Bateman as Marcella}

Things pick up with a strong first-act finale, a Rossini-style virtuosic aria for the tenor impersonating Cardenio’s brother, and an extended duet for estranged husband and wife that has something of the emotional power that infuses similar numbers in Anna Bolena and Lucrezia Borgia.

Iqbal Khan’s pleasantly conventional staging is loosely evocative of the slave-trading Napoleonic era without pushing too push hard at the ideological implications, and Jeremy Silver’s jaunty conducting keeps the pace buoyant. Where the production scores, however, is in its casting of four admirable singers in the main roles.

Craig Smith is all wounded nobility as the wronged Wild Man and the underrated Sally Silver lives up to her surname with some lustrous and scintillating singing as his repentant wife. Nicholas Sharratt copes very skilfully with the technical demands of his showpiece tenor aria, and Peter Brathwaite’s virile baritone, crisp enunciation and sensitive acting makes the character of the slave sympathetic and dignified rather than the farcical blackface turn that may have been originally intended.

Even if this opera never going to catch on widely, Donizetti fans will be grateful to have seen and heard it so competently and honourably performed. Hats off to ETO.

Touring until 27 May. Tickets: englishtouringopera.org.uk