BWW Reviews: BALLO (OR A MASKED BALL), King's Head Theatre, April 25 2013

There are times when theatre transcends entertainment, transcends its history, transcends time and space and takes you to another place - a place where all you can do is thank the Fates that conspired to put you right here, right now. Adam Spreadbury-Maher's Ballo (or A Masked Ball) takes you to that place.

Verdi's opera, based on the tragic love triangle that led to the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden in 1792, is swiftly recounted in an animation (voiced in a cod Swedish accent that would make the Muppets' Chef blush) before a note is even sung. Then the action shifts to Ballo, a megastore on the North Circular branded with the blue and yellow of the Swedish flag and specialising in flat-pack furniture. It even has a ball room where you can leave the kids. And then things get weird.

With Verdi's soaring score rolling over us like a kind of shop anti-muzak, we meet store manager Riccardo. He may be master of all he surveys, loved by his PA Oscar and his devoted best friend, assistant manager Renato and ever so pleased with himself, but Riccardo, though he may love all his staff (except shady cleaner with a grudge, Tom), saves his lust for Amelia, Renato's wife. She, equally secretly, equally unrequitedly, lusts after him. So when an initially jokey call to moonlighting Ulrica, the complaints department's part-time astrologer, foretells that Riccardo is soon to die, the blue and yellow clad workers are set on a path to their annual works party - and disaster.

If that were it - with some of the funniest acting I've witnessed this year, brilliantly inventive staging and design and a heartbreaking denouement - Ballo would be worth every penny of the ticket price. But you also get the singing - and what singing. Paul Featherstone's Riccardo is all charismatic lightness and wit, if ultimately noble with just a touch of cruelty. Mark Holland's Renato bristles like his hair with controlled anger, growling in a voice that goes to the depth of his despair and shakes the very building as his life totters on the edge of destruction. Equally angry, equally plumbing the lowest notes of the bass range, is Dickon Gough's Tom, whose hatred of Riccardo is opposed emotionally and vocally by Alan Richardson's Oscar - think Graham Norton with Charlotte Church's voice.

Emelie Joenniemi as the hippy Ulrica is wonderfully funny in her astrological kookiness and might even get to see One Direction one day. But Laura Hudson's Amelia is the standout amongst a cast of standouts, hitting the highest of notes as her divided loves take her deeper and deeper into her dilemma - husband or lover, duty or danger, daughter or freedom?

With Ben Woodward on keyboards, the seven performers create a world filled with love and hate, music and laughter, murder and meatballs - and it's all as up close as OperaUpClose promise, so close you almost need to turn away from the emotions raging at barely arm's length. You won't have seen anything quite like it before, and you may never see anything quite like it again.

Ballo (or A Masked Ball) continues at The King's Head until May 25.

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