The Barber of Seville review – Miller’s 1987 staging still sparkles

Coliseum, London
Rossini’s comedy is engaging, warm and witty in this revival of Jonathan Miller’s staging with Charles Rice’s Figaro dominating – as he should

The English National Opera season continues with a revival by Peter Relton of Jonathan Miller’s 1987 staging of Rossini’s great comedy of love, class, money and manipulation, still a wonderfully engaging piece of theatre nearly four decades after it was first seen. The multiple casts that have come and gone over the years have inevitably resulted in shifts of emphasis and sometimes mood – some of its past outings have felt fractionally more barbed than on this occasion.

It remains marvellously witty and astute, particularly in its depiction of a world where everyone seems to be on the make, but we’re now less immediately aware, perhaps, of the grotesque, slightly sinister way which Dr Bartolo (Simon Bailey) immures Rosina (Anna Devin) in a house full of specimen jars and barbaric-looking medical equipment. And in the past, the ending was sometimes more ambiguous in suggesting the consequences, familiar from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, of Rosina’s eventual marriage to an aristocrat she has only ever encountered in successive disguises, and therefore never really known or understood.