Opera fans are in for a treat next month when two of the UK’s best-loved small-scale opera companies head this way, finds Nicola Lisle

Just like the buses, you wait for an opera company and then two come along at once. First there’s The Merry Opera Company, living up to its name with a typically sparkling production of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, soon to be seen in Chipping Norton and Wallingford.

“I’m looking to entertain people in the depths of winter, and bring a bit of Seville sunshine to England,” promises director John Ramster.

Audiences will be transported to what John calls a “strangely surreal” world, with men sporting Bertie Wooster-type moustaches against a background of outsized barbers’ implements.

“We’ve got a very big barber’s brush that’s a chair, and there’s a very big light that looks like a razor,” says John. “It all looks strangely in period but at the same time strangely modern. So it’s a kind of theatrical experience as well.”

This quirky setting is driven, of course, by the need to come up with an ingenious way of reducing an opera that is normally played in the large opera houses.

“With limitation comes invention, especially when you’re dealing with small budgets as well,” John says. “So you have to be imaginative in a way that actually you don’t when you’re working in the bigger houses, especially as we‘re only doing one night in each venue.

“So it needs to be quick, it needs to be clean and it needs to be witty, and I think we’ve come up with a really fun way to get around these problems.”

Opera Up Close has come up with some equally inventive ideas for its production of The Marriage of Figaro. Director Sarah Tipple has created an ‘opera within an opera’ to give the piece a slightly different twist, as Robin Norton-Hale, the company’s co-founder, explains. “What Sarah has done is to have a group of travelling performers who are putting on a production of The Marriage of Figaro,” she says.

“They are in modern dress, and they are a group of singers, and they have their own relationships which mirror those in The Marriage of Figaro. So the Count is the boss of this troupe of actors, and he’s married to the women who plays the countess.”

To emphasise this effect of a world within another world, the actors can be seen sitting around the stage, gathering props for their next entrance and putting on elements of period costume over their modern attire as they move from their ‘real’ character to their Mozartian one.

“It’s all very theatrical,” Robin says. “The mezzo who plays Marcellina also plays Basilio, and you see her change her top and hat in order to change character, so we’re not trying to hide the fact that this is a piece of theatre. So there’s a stage within a stage, and you’ve got two stories going on at once. We wanted to make it easy for audiences to draw parallels with the modern world, without losing the world of the original.”

The Merry Opera Company: The Barber of Seville
The Theatre, Chipping Norton
February 11
Tickets: 01608 642350 or chippingnortontheatre.com
Wallingford Corn Exchange
February 28, 7.45pm
Tickets: 01491 825000 or cornexchange.org.uk

Opera Up Close: The Marriage of Figaro
The North Wall, Summertown
February 13 and 14, 7.30pm
Tickets: 01865 31945050 or thenorthwall.com