The Italian Girl in Algiers

In rounding off 2009 with a pair of light comedies, it would appear Scottish Opera were playing their cards safely, but Colin McColl's production of The Italian Girl in Algiers, though amusing and light-hearted, is anything but. A collaboration with New Zealand Opera, McColl's staging of the Rossini's hit is bewildering and at times utterly bizarre, though he's managed to pull off what seems an incredibly audacious concept as something that's really quite excellent.

McColl's idea is that "Rossini's early works – written quickly and to order – were the soap opera's of their day", and so re-imagines The Italian Girl as a daytime b-drama. The lynchpin of the performance is McColl's utilisation of green-screen technology: the actors are filmed in real time, and projected onto a screen at the back of the set with various backgrounds, from blooming roses to yacht-strewn beaches. Though this gives rise to plenty of amusing slapstick moments, McColl's real victory here is how he sets the two genres of dramma giocoso and soap opera against one another so that they conflict and undermine, yet also compliment each other perfectly. Over the evening we are invited to laugh equally at both forms of high and low art, and most of the time it is surprisingly very, very funny.

Occasionally, however, it goes too far. There are moments when a trio of scantily clad beach babes appear on stage during a great tune for seemingly no other reason than to distract us from it, as if McColl were scared we'd remember we were at opera rather than in front of the telly. And when they come out bouncing around on beach balls for no apparent reason, the joke starts to get annoyingly old. This is a small gripe though in a staging that could have gone incredibly wrong were it not for the creativity involved in the production and the energy with which it is performed. Tiziano Bracci, Karen Cargill and Thomas Walker manage to carry the humour of McColl's vision without totally obscuring the comedy of the original libretto. Cargill is particularly wonderful, and her vocal performance as Isabella is a joy to hear. So – yes, yes, yes. There's nothing better than seeing a talented company go all out on something that goes all the way.