On his death, Giuseppe Verdi bequeathed a house in Milan to become a retirement home for opera singers. It must have been a riot: full of elderly tenors and superannuated sopranos who once a year put on a gala performance in honour of their benefactor's birthday. Ronald Harwood's play transplants the situation to a country house in Kent, where four rapidly fading stars of the British opera stage are rehearsing their final hurrah, a reprise of the quartet from Verdi's Rigoletto. It is easy to imagine how a benevolent home for opera singers could quickly become a malevolent home for giant egos who can barely stand to be in the same room together.
In truth, there's a ruminative conviviality about Kevin Shaw's production that divests the situation of much of its drama. When tenor Reginald learns that his ex-wife will be joining him out to pasture, he is initially horrified, but concedes "we must press the cliche button and make the best of it". In fact, the characters press the cliche button so frequently you fear it may jam. And though the concluding scene has a hammy charm, the means by which the singers relive their gilded youth feels like a cop-out.
Anny Tobin is regal as a soprano who can no longer get up above the stave, and Col Farrell plays an impotent tenor who cannot get up at all. Russell Dixon is enjoyably lewd as a rubicund old reprobate, but he speaks the truest words in the piece when he says "time doesn't move slowly in here. It hobbles along with a zimmer frame."
