On the great highway of opera roles, Oberto is a Commendatore en route to becoming a Rigoletto. But dramatically the piece is an uphill struggle, shifting from scene to scene with a mechanical awkwardness that would defeat the most experienced director. John Tomlinson's solution is simply to let his characters stand and sing - for which I'm sure they're grateful, and as a result there are some strong, and very big performances. To a collector of repertory Oberto has undeniable interest: its narrative of an old man avenging his dishonoured child is the embryo of all the father/daughter relationships that dominate the laterVerdi works.
So Opera North's new production in Leeds is something out of the ordinary, the more so for having the celebrated bass John Tomlinson not only singing the title role but directing the show, his first venture into production Frankly, he hasn't chosen an easy vehicle for his debut. Although that is not so very young by the standards of mid-19th-century opera composers, the score is clearly an apprentice piece, trapped in conventions passed down the line from Rossini, Donizetti and Bel-lini (who all, needless to say, used them more imaginatively) For good reasons it isn't often done. VERDI's first opera was probably Oberto, written at the age of 26. For a moment, it sounded like post-modernism before its time but, in truth, it was just Tom's modest way of telling us, "I am real" And we believed him.. I could think of none better than the one we got: dear Tom Pinch telling his sister that not everyone lives happily ever after, that she shouldn't think of him "as if I were a character in a book". The triple wedding option remained a figment of adaptor David Lodge's imagination than God. Martin Chuzzlewit (BBC2) departed amidst controversy about its ending.
Why would this Hen ry have bothered killing his wife, when he could have legged it with just about anybody else's? For that matter why would he have read aloud from the book of poisons in the public library? The internal monologues feel odd forced out into the open like th is. Where Williams really scores is in the face-to-face exchanges: no one has a better ear for the way that some graduates of therapy use their needs as a truncheon.On Newsnight (BBC2), a lifelong Dudley West Conservative said he was tempted to vote Labour: "That Lionel Blair has a lot going for him." Yes indeed Super hair, makes a splendid song and dance about things. When Elinor booms at her "funny little man" what we are meant to see is a creature of the same ilk as Dame Edna's vanquished bridesmaid, Madge, who afte r years of stoic evasion decides to slay the great She Cow. What we actually see is Robert Lindsay, a sexy actor unsuccessfully hiding behind a pair of specs. Lindsay is more seductive than Steadman which fatally skews the murder plot. Asfor viewers, they may have had difficulty swallowing Robert Lindsay's Henry.
Henry's plan does go wrong, though, mainly because Elinor won't swallow it - it being the thalium in the chicken breast and subsequently the bleach in the funeral punch. Hafenrichter h as dug up some great material here, but her style of presentation is trapped on the surface. The series is in danger of being as restless and empty as the world it seeks to satirise.Like Henry's plan to bump off his wife, The Wimbledon Poisoner (BBC1) couldn't fail, could it? There was Nigel Williams adapting his own blissfully comic novel of the same name, and the great Alison Steadman playing Elinor, the spouse who has taken the kind of assertiveness class that can make trains run on time, never mind husbands. Smile we're on television"), was surely just a glossier version of any pushy parent in front of the Polaroid on Clacton beach. The film tried to press the view of Hollywood as another planet where different rules obtain.
But Pia Zadora,a raddled Barbie reprimanding her stolid little girl ("No, no, that's not nice Don't act like a child. He should count himself lucky he wasn't called Ingrown.The Creator, it seems, enjoys making mischief with famous genes, giving daughters like Victoria Sellers the faces of their "characterful" fathers rather than their gorgeous mothers. Jumpy survivors of multiple marriages revealed everything about a society where the extended family has become so elastic that one boy went to a party and tried to pick up a girl who turned out to be his half-sister. As with its precursor, Hollywood Women, the cutting style suggested that one of the brats had gotten into the editing suite. Occasionally, the karate chops workedto great comic effect, as when we zapped from Frank Zappa's daughter solemnly introducing herself - "My name is Moon Unit" - to her brothers Dweezil and Alimet and then back to Moon who explained "Dweezil was named after my mother's baby toe ".