State Opera South Australia. Festival Theatre. 8 May 2025
Flight is playing for only three performances and finishes Saturday 10 May 2025. If you are an opera die-hard or simply opera-curious, you’ll want to see this. It is strikingly staged, is acted with style, and is sung beautifully. It is genuinely funny, with the audience frequently laughing out loud, it has moments of heart-rending poignancy, and it is provocative at times. It’s the full deal!
Flight, with music by Jonathan Dove and libretto by April de Angelis, is a comic opera set in an airport, where a group of stranded travellers – including a diplomat and his heavily pregnant wife, a couple reigniting their romance, a mature lady about to meet her fiancé for the first time, and a refugee stranded without papers – face flight delays because of storms, resulting in them having to sleep overnight at the departure gate. As they reveal personal secrets and confront emotional baggage, the opera blends humour and pathos. De Angelis’ libretto is beautifully constructed with frequent and clever rhyming, and concision. Director Stephen Barlow uses his cast beautifully as he gets them to extract every ounce of meaning from every sentence: words are prompts for how the cast use and move around the stage. Henry Choo as Bill and Samuel Dale Johnson as The Steward are especially effective in their stagecraft, and they excel in everything they sing: clarity and musicality abound.
The mysterious refugee, inspired by the true story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who lived in the departure lounge of Terminal 1 in Charles de Gaulle Airport from 26 August 1988 until July 2006 when he was hospitalized, becomes a symbol of human displacement which continues to be tragically topical in today’s world. Flight explores themes of compassion, transformation, and the shared humanity beneath superficial differences.
Dove’s music is catchy and fun, modern and unpredictable, which often lulls the listener into experiencing the passage of time more slowly and amplifies the gravity of the thematic material. It is full of surprising orchestrations, and the use of percussion is a highlight.
Counter-tenor James Laing plays The Refugee with vulnerability and grace. His aria Dawn, still darkness… deep in Act 3 highlights the pain of statelessness. It’s a high point of the performance. Dove’s decision to score the role as a countertenor rather than a tenor or baritone is inspired: the poignancy of The Refugee’s plight is heightened.
Anna Voshege sings The Controller and her gorgeous coloratura soprano voice rides high above the stage, literally! Voshege gives the character control, authority and compassion, but evokes isolation. Her obvious concern for The Refugee, especially towards the end of the opera, is quite affecting.
Nina Korbe plays Tina, Bill’s partner. Korbe gives her both coquettishness and sass, and we are in no doubt who really wears the pants in the relationship. Cherie Boogaart plays The Older Woman and excels in giving her an air of mystery as well as naivety. Boogaart knows when she has humorous lyrics, and extracts every laugh possible.
Ashlyn Tymms plays The Stewardess, and frequently steals the show with the antics she gets up to with her fellow Steward (Samuel Dale Johnson). Their practised smiles are a hit, and the ‘elevator scene’ is sufficiently raunchy for the show to almost merit a rating!
Jeremy Tatchell has a smaller role as the Diplomat, but he sings and acts it fabulously. His tessitura is a perfect fit for Dove’s music. Fiona McArdle plays his pregnant wife, and she is superb. This is possibly the best thing that McArdle has done. Like Tatchell, the music fits her voice like a stylish glove, and her acting is first rate.
And then there is Teddy Tahu Rhodes, who plays The Immigration Officer. His impressive bass baritone voice fills the auditorium and immediately conveys authority. His diction is perfect, and his character demands respect. As Voshege does for The Controller, Rhodes also gives The Immigration Officer a wide streak of overt humanity, and we all wish that in today’s troubled world border force officers were also able to exercise compassion and discretion as does The Immigration Officer.
Director Barlow also uses some local actors as additional travellers, and he gives each of them distinct (and humorous) traits. It’s a nice touch.
Andrew Riley’s design is imposing but straightforward. It’s perfectly clear that we are located in an airport departure lounge replete with sliding doors leading to departure gates, a TV screen showing flight statuses, bench seats that are clearly uncomfortable, as they are in real airports, and the rear wall is used as giant projection screen upon which simple but effective images are projected to depict planes arriving, storms and the like.
The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra sounded fabulous under the baton of conductor Charlotte Corderoy. There a few minor issues with principal singers being almost overshadowed by the orchestra early in act 1, but this was soon resolved.
This production of Flight originates from Scottish Opera, and is a reimagined version of the one performed at Opera Holland park in 2015. This international collaboration with State Opera South Australia strongly underlines SOSA artistic director Dane Lam’s vison of SOSA being part of a creative ecosystem of “opera without borders”.
Remember, this fabulous production closes this weekend! Don’t delay in getting your tickets. It really is fun!
Kym Clayton
When: 8 to 10 May
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
