I'm a stranger here myself (Linbury Studio, 18May00) Eva Meier, Robert Ziegler (conductor), Matrix Ensemble Mrs O's Saturday nights, music by Alasdair Nicholson, text by Alastair Cording (HMS President, 23May00) Linda Ormiston, Harry Nicoll, Alexander Oliver Alasdair Nicholson (music director/piano) Eleanor Mathieson (fiddle) Mark Thistlewood (bass) Director Alastair Cording The Remarkable Life of Mr Kelly, by Martin Mooney (Peacock Theatre, 24May00) Tinuke Olafimihan, Adrian Thompson, Donald Maxwell Paul McGrath (conductor), London Mozart Players Justin Wray (director) Tristan and Isolde (Linbury Studio, 27May00) Declan Kelly Steersman/Melot/Shepherd Penelope Chalmers Isolde Heather Fryer Brangaene Keel Watson Kurwenal Russell Hibbert Tristan Gerard O'Connor King Marke Jeremy Silver (music director/first piano), Nicholas Bosworth (second piano) Mark Tinkler Director Camberwell Pocket Opera The BOC Covent Garden Festival offers a rare selection of good light entertainment, almost invisible in London these days unless you count Starlight Express. The venues, apart from the dreary Peacock theatre, are interesting, cozy or both, and audiences are unembarassedly lower middle brow. If it's all a bit Radio 4, at least you're getting out of the house and, if you choose, into one of the area's mainly not-bad or better bars and restaurants afterwards. A climactic accident means that you're probably getting soaking wet at some point as well, but you can think of that as re-enacting the opening scene of My Fair Lady. Eva Meier's German cabaret programme, with a few additions in the same spirit by Peer Raben,is comfortingly familiar. The Weill numbers, German and American, are all standards and even the Hollaender songs are well-known from Ute Lemper's CD. Meier is similarly reassuring, getting the different authentic styles required without Lemper's anger or weirdness. She doesn't take the audience for granted, but she knows exactly how far to go. She made the very funny encore, Hollaender's Raus mit den Maennern, seem wholesome rather than satirical of either men or feminists. Mrs O's Saturday Nights was also extremely comforting. Commissioned for the 1998 festival, it is essentially a session of traditional songs and fiddle music, hung on the memories of the tenor Sandy Oliver of his mother's days as a publican in Scotland in the 1950s. The stage was set up in the bar of HMS President, a navy training ship moored on the Victoria Embankment, with the audience sitting at bar tables. Oliver and the other performers narrated, impersonated and sang in a slightly confused but engaging way. Linda Ormiston was splendid in authentic tweed skirt ("from the Shetland Shop -- such good quality and such reasonable prices") and one of those silk blouses whose buttons never quite reach an accommodation with a matriarchal bosom. Harry Nicoll sang superbly, and Oliver was clearly having a great time. It is toe-curling to think that Scottish people really sang Jeannie my Scots bluebell and A wee jock and doris, but the narrator made the point that Mrs O's sing-songs in the 1950s were always already ready-made nostalgia for the order destroyed by the war. The Remarkable Life of Mr Kelly also aspired to be a musical evening with a narrative frame, but it was more pretentious and less successful. The numbers were a more-or-less OK eighteenth-century recital for soprano, tenor and baritone (with the strange inclusion of some extremely uninteresting selections from Britten's Beggar's Opera arrangements) while the narrative seemed to be an inner dialogue between Kelly's tenor and baritone manifestations. Not all of it made sense, perhaps because of cuts. But Tinuke Olafimihan was entirely plausible vocally and visually as a London diva of the ottocento, and Donald Maxwell and Adrian Thompson were their usual theatrical selves. Surprisingly, most of the audience for Camberwell Pocket Opera's Tristan seemed not to be familiar with the opera and stayed to the end through some extremely painful singing, presumably to see what happened (or perhaps to see if the singers got through it I suppose). The production has had generally rude reviews, and of course if you want the familiar German gibberish and orchestral sweep, Carlos Wagner's lucid rhymed English translation and two pianos do not hit the spot. But anybody who wanted Wagner as he intended was probably upstairs watching Die Meistersinger. In steerage there was a first-rate Brangaene, an ingenious production with Star Wars costumes and a circular platform with a curtain, (Kurwenal got into a fight with the curtain at an unfortunate moment but otherwise it all worked smoothly and effectively) and a lot of committment. It's an interesting idea that Tristan might not be fated simply to be replayed at great expense to those who already know it, but might be new and moving in itself, even without vocal and orchestral glory.