Botoxed out of all proportion

“SKIN DEEP”, Opera North at the Lowry

ON the surface — as it were — this must have seemed a wonderful idea.

But somewhere between design and delivery, brilliant comedy writer and first-time librettist Armando Iannucci — the man behind everything from Alan Partridge to “The Day Today” — and acclaimed composer David Sawer, forgot to put much natural life in their new operetta: it’s as if it has been been botoxed to an unnatural tightness.

The theme is a wanton desire for perfection, personified by brilliant surgeon Needlemeier (the enjoyable Geoffrey Dolton).

He gives his wife Lania (Janis Kelly, rather wasted) surgery for each birthday, wants to correct the flaws of his receptionist (the fine Heather Shipp) before he can have an affair with her, and corrects “what nature got wrong” at his Swiss clinic. His chief invention, almost perfected, is an elixir of life, brewed from the discarded bits of the rich and once-ugly.

Things get out of hand as he swaps his wife’s perfect face for his girlfriend’s scarred one and encourages his daughter (Amy Freston) to make her suitor (Adrian Dwyer) get surgery to correct his minor bodily flaws — as a result of which, he falls in love with his own reflection, forcing her to have herself made to look like him so he will fall for her.

Ultimately, he does the dirtiest deed: stealing, and yes, the victim notices, the one item he needs to make his elixir work properly, one of the testicles of handsome movie star Luke Pollock (Mark Stone). You get the significance of the name as soon as Iannucci reaches for his rhyming dictionary.

So far, so good. But the work is billed as an operetta — a light-hearted work with mostly singing and traces of dialogue. And when called to give his best, Iannucci’s libretto is filled with funny lines and contemporary silliness.

But it isn’t a great match for Sawer’s cut-down, intricately-woven sonic textures, themselves quite beautiful at times, but too lean and serious for such a loose-minded satire on society.

The effect is to drag down what should be buoyed up and fun. This makes the evening seem rather long and drawn out, with a third act that loses its way rather early on and leaves the story nowhere to go but into the realms of the surreal.

The effect is worsened by direction from Richard Jones that seems rather perfunctory at best.