Opera gets the last laugh

This wildly funny, visually rich staging of The Barber of Seville blends meta-theatre, music and mayhem into an unmissable operatic joyride

- Keith Bain

The Barber of Seville is bold, brash and hilarious, and before the titular barber, aka Figaro, even appears on stage, you feel his larger-than-life presence, signalled by the boastful lyrics of that famous aria, Largo al factotum (“make way for the factotum”), in which he praises himself and sings about how indispensable he is.

Even if you've never seen or heard the opera in full, you will recognise the song — it’s the one that contains those immortal lines, “Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!”

Bright, cheeky, quick-witted and lucid, baritone Thando Zwane’s Figaro is in many ways a personification of this perky opera. And, despite those preening introductory lyrics, you cannot help but fall instantly in love with him; his charms are irresistible, his voice sublime.

In Cape Town Opera’s new production of the farcical Italian opera, director Sylvaine Strike has cleverly overlaid multiple realities, creating a kind of meta-theatre.

While it reaches back across time to the ancient roots of comedy, it also pulls us into a slipstream where parallel timelines are unfolding: there’s the original 18th-century French farce by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, there’s the 1816 comic opera by Gioachino Rossini and there’s the subsequent 200 years during which the composer’s groundbreaking music has become part of our very understanding of what comedy sounds like.

In this slightly unhinged world, there’s a bearded lady and there’s a chorus of soldiers who spontaneously bust a few dance moves. There are illicitly penned letters and farcical plans (executed like something out of a silent-era movie) involving a ladder that gets carried onto stage but is never used. There’s the thinly disguised handsome lover and his hapless opponent, a doddering old man, who have their sights set on marrying the same young beauty.