`Catchiness' is not an issue you'll find much discussed in connection with contemporary operas. But it was bouncing around in conversation as I left Thursday's performance of Daron Hagen's Vera of Las Vegas, an opera written in 1997, and now on its European première tour in a new Opera Theatre Company production by Annilese Miskimmon, writes Michael Dervan. Also reviewed: The Smallest Person at the Pavillion Theatre.

Opera Theatre Company The Helix, Daron Hagen - Vera of Las Vegas

One the major problems in many recent operas has to do with the difficulty composers experience in plausibly marrying their chosen texts to the musical style in which they want to write.

Paul Muldoon's libretto for Vera is sharp and well-conceived, and Hagen seems to have made a clear decision not to get in its way.

He's taken a polyglot approach to the music, and written it as a kind of mood-identifying background, sometimes in keeping with the words, but often deliriously, hilariously at odds with them, though in a way that manages to highlight them without undermining them.

It's quite a clever ploy, even if Hagen's vocal lines do sometimes let the enterprise down, when they fall uncomfortably between the stools of the Broadway musical and sentimental song.

Yet he's timed the work well. It's mostly brisk in pace, and plays for around an hour with no interval.

Miskimmon's production, with a cyclorama-ish set by Neil Irish (and heaps of costume changes) and scene-setting video projections by Ciara Moore, hardly misses a trick in keeping things moving, as two IRA men, Taco and Dumdum, on the run as illegal immigrants in the US, are hunted and tracked by the immigration authorities.

Individuals in the chase change sides, and the sexy lure of Vera herself leads on to a re-run of the most famous scene from Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, here played offstage, but causing totally unexpected consequences.

The opera is framed by sequences which make it clear that the action is in fact Taco's nightmare, after he has passed out during rough interrogation.

The music, directed from keyboards with spirit by David Brophy, is really rather cheap. But that's how Hagen seems to want it, immediate, functional, often a bit sleazy.

The singing of the main roles is spirited - Eugene Ginty as Taco, Alan Fairs as Dumdum, Charlotte Page as Doll, Jonathan Peter Kenny as the transvestite Vera - though things become a little stickier at the moments of greatest lyricism and earnestness.

The multi-tasking chorus (Rebekah Coffey, Carolyn Dobbin, Shirley Keane, Bridget Knowles, Elizabeth Woods) are as vivacious and resourceful in their many assumptions as anyone could wish for. -Michael Dervan

The final performance of Vera of Las Vegas is at The Helix tonight.

The Smallest Person, Pavilion Theatre

This unusual production is based on the story of a tiny girl, 19 inches high at the age of eight, who was paraded around London in a kind of freak show in the early 19th century. She was known as the Sicilian Fairy, and a quack doctor named Gilligan had secured her from her parents, who were itinerant musicians.

He made money showing her during her short consumptive life, and tried in vain for more after her death by selling her corpse to anatomy schools.

Woven around her story is a modern fiction about an epileptic boy whose sister tries to prevent his transfer abroad for experimental treatment.

Analogies are proposed that probe medical ethics, the moral dilemmas that often affect the work of doctors and the evolution of medical practice over the centuries.

But the heart of the play is the affecting little girl who charmed even the King, George IV.

The magic is in the treatment by the UK's Trestle Theatre Company, which presents the work through dialogue, puppets and masks. The two children are played by puppets, and others by a host of adults - although the cast is only five - through a brilliant deployment of half-face and full-face masks.

Costumes, particularly the period dress, also contribute to a convincing ambience.

An ingenious platform set design, with backing panels that function as numerous entrances and exits, complete an absorbing production that is beautifully acted.

The play, written by Timothy Knapman and directed by Emily Gray, touches nerves in a meaningful way.

It is indeed a pity that the company's stay here is so short. - Gerry Colgan