Die Fledermaus - J Strauss
Directors of opera, like directors of Shakespeare, like to update their material and Kurt Palm's version of Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus is set in the 1960s instead of the 1870s.
The dialogue, spoken in English, has been brought up to the 1990s, but the acting is 1960s Abbey comedy and the music and singing are firmly in the last century.
There is confusion of accents - American, English, Irish both urban and rural, mock French and Hungarian - which adds to the plot's confusion of identities.
Shakespeare made dramatic sense of an even more involved plot in his Comedy of Errors, but Strauss and his librettists were not too gifted in this direction.
The operetta stands or falls by its music and the dialogue serves as a rather amateur linking device, though mention should be made of Frank Kelly's amusing cameo of a drunk prison warder.
The RTE Concert Orchestra, conducted by David T. Heusel, provided plenty of foot-tapping melody and accompanied the singing with the requisite warmth.
The singing was in German and belonged inescapably to the Vienna of the past; it had little to do with the convulsive rock and rolling bodies of the cast as they played out a 1960s charade in garish costumes.
The tenor Michael Kristensen gave the most pleasure - he took the part of Alfred and made a good partner for Janis Kelly as Rosalinde. Whenever she was singing the emotional tension moved up a notch.
Louise Walsh as Rosalinde's maid was always vivacious and wore her mini skirt with aplomb. John Hancock (baritone), who gave a persuasive portrayal in the title-role of Opera Ireland's Eugene Onegin last year, was less at home in the part of the "Batman" whose machinations cause the entire cast to end up in gaol.
Modern dress productions can throw new light on old texts: but when the masked ball that takes up the whole of act 2 is turned into a 60s party with champagne instead of beer, and not a mask in sight, one wonders what point the director was trying to make.
Any punch that the Fledermaus can carry is inseparable from the moral (or immoral) code of its period.