The Elixir of Love review – an intoxicating brush with a snake oil salesman

Hackney Empire, London
English Touring Opera’s witty production sets this Donizetti comedy at the seaside, complete with donkey rides, fish and chips and a persuasive conman

A programme essay asks what there is to laugh about in Donizetti’s Elixir of Love. It’s a good question to ask about an opera whose two main characters spend much of the evening being unhappy. But the answer, in Martin Constantine’s well judged new production for English Touring Opera, is - plenty. With witty sets and costumes by April Dalton, Constantine’s production neatly transports the setting from rural Italian village to English coastal town, but with no loss of the music’s sparkle, affability or poignancy.

The setting offers Constantine the use of almost every available cliche of the rundown English seaside resort – there are donkey rides, a fish and chip van, a pair of lifeguards, a solitary fisherman in sou’wester and oilskins, as well as a theatre that has seen better days. Though it stops short of the Donald McGill world of double entendre postcards, that’s maybe because there’s a contemporary point being made here too. A conman from outside arrives in town to play the pivotal role in this opera, and Dr Dulcamara’s snake-oil elixir has a delicate whiff of Farage, never overstated, about it.

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