For anyone tempted to think of opera as stuffy, remote or inaccessible, this production shows we might all have opera-sized feelings, even when trying to give a professional veneer at the office partyRating
Excellent
Think of Scottish Opera’s 2025-26 season of Opera Highlights as a work of fan-fiction combining all the best bits of several classic works into an original narrative. This isn’t a recital of famous arias, but a fresh look at what makes these pieces relatable today. This is opera performed at human scale, asking what happens to grandiose emotions when we try to squish them into tiny boxes dominated by professional codes of etiquette and fluorescent strip lighting?
Set in an office on the day of a leaving party in the beige, brown and orange 1970s, the story follows the complex secrets, alliances, betrayals and discoveries of four co-workers, conveyed through extracts beautifully stitched together by Scottish Opera’s Head of Music Fiona MacSherry, Director Emma Doherty and Designer Kenneth MacLeod. Onstage relationships grow progressively more frenetic as the colleagues’ professional masks slip through the course of the day and into the leaving party itself.
Opening with the prologue from Pagliacci, baritone James Geidt reminds us not to take it all too seriously – we will see scenes of high drama, but it’ll all come out alright in the end. Roméo et Juliette features enthusiastic promises to meet again tomorrow by soprano Ceferina Penny and tenor Luvo Maranti, sung into 1970s-style corded telephones. It’s comically ended by Geidt’s sudden mutiny against the inescapable din of the open-plan office.
In a sudden hush and darkness, mezzo-soprano Chloe Harris tugs hard at the heartstrings with her elegiac rendition of hidden love and loneliness as she clandestinely pores over letters written to her by an illicit admirer in an extract from Werther. A return to Pagliacci continues the theme of forbidden love, with Penny and Geidt finding solace in one another’s arms, dreaming of a new life together. Maranti’s wounded dignity when he discovers them is sublimely comedic.
Post-interval, the office atmosphere has become distinctly seedier, with party hats askew and previously pristine motivational posters showing some wear and tear from the fraught festivities. A Hand of Bridge expresses the split between the four characters’ internal and external narratives, with roiling and sometimes disturbing emotions hidden behind a sociable facade. Rival love interests come to a head in Alcina’s ‘He bewilders my affections’, as Harris, though smitten with Marantini, refuses to be used as a puppet by him to stimulate Penny’s jealousy when she realises his flirting is all for show. The party gets ever messier and wilder, but all comes right in the end with selections from Die Fledermaus. Geidt and Maranti delight with their bro-dancing in ‘It’s the talk of the town’, and in the end all sins are forgotten and forgiven in the good fellowship of ‘The Champagne Song’, with vows of eternal friendship all round.
Design, particularly Barry McDonald’s lighting, is a standout feature of this production, creating little zones of intimacy and simultaneous, often covert, happenings around the stage throughout. Energetic staging gives depth and nuance to the plot, helping to weave the disparate stories together into a cohesive new narrative. All in all, a refreshing delight. This production is well worth a watch when it returns to the road in spring.
Directed by Emma Doherty
Music Director/Pianist: Meghan Rhoades
Design by Kenneth MacLeod
Lighting Design by Barry McDonald
Opera Highlights has completed its run at Traverse Theatre. The show will tour across Scotland during February and March 2026, with tickets going on sale from 4 December.
