Margery Sinead Pratschke Mauxalinda Yvonne Fontane Moore of Moore-Hall Christopher Lemmings Dragon/servant James Bobby Gubbins Michael Bundy Director Jack Edwards Music director Peter Holman Opera Restor’d The dragon of Wantley, was first produced in 1739, and ran on and off for the rest of the century. Unlike The beggar’s opera, the only English comic opera more successful in the eighteenth century, The dragon has an original score that is a knowing parody of the music of Italian opera with special reference to Handel. The composer, John Frederick Lampe, was another German immigrant to London and also played bassoon in Handel’s opera orchestra. The parody works at all levels, from the assignment of types of roles and arias to the banality of the words and word painting. There are rival queens fighting for a cod-castrato hero (actually sung by a tenor, but performed in the original as a send-up of Farinelli) and a very stupid thuggish bass dragon, originally sung by Thomas Reinhold, the original Cadmus and Somnus. The soprano rival has a distraught aria (“Sure my stays will burst from sobbing”) in the right sort of place, while the mezzo has a Bradamante-style heroic aria in praise of the hero. The two of them have a proper musical catfight (“Insulting gypsy, you‘re surely tipsy“), much more authentically Italian than the equivalent in The beggar’s opera. The libretto, by Henry Carey, is very broad-brush comedy that sets up plenty of operatic jokes. Based on a ballad that might be a satire on lawyers, it is basically a mummer’s play done in high-falutin’ style. A dragon is rampaging around Wantley (in Yorkshire), pinching people's breakfast, so Gubbins and his daughter Margery call in Moore of Moore Hall. Moore, whose main interests are beer, women and killing things, falls for Margery even though he is engaged to Mauxalinda and bullshits like crazy when Mauxalinda finds out. Margery is disturbed by a dream, then Mauxalinda tries to kill her but Moore persuades them to make up before killing the dragon with a kick up the backside. They don’t make them like that any more. The libretto on its own is pretty funny, and the music is at times quite wonderful. If you don’t listen to the words too closely, you might be listening to lost out-takes from Semele. It would clearly be worth performing with high-end Handelian singers. But Opera Restor’d is a shoestring operation and they wisely concentrated on the broader picture. Costumes were pantomime style: Margery was covered with flowers (which Mauxalinda ripped off); Mauxalinda had a wide dress whose front opened like curtains to reveal puppets on her knees, and a pointed had whose top concealed a dagger; Moore was a jungle version of Herne the Hunter, trailing a whole tiger; and the dragon was, well, a dragon. The scenery was painted flats, with a small puppet theatre on stage at the start from which the dragon ate the puppets. The business was an amiable exaggeration of operatic gestures and poses. More preparation and more confidence might have made things much funnier, but it was all agreeably dotty. The singers didn’t have much chance to shine in the circumstances, and none of them really projected into the comparatively small space of the Linbury studio. (Opera Restor’d typically performs in church halls and end-of-pier theatres.) But Sinead Pratschke as Margery had a good comic grasp of the vocal style. The small band, on period instruments, seemed much more secure than the singers and also found lots of humour.