The only full-time opera company in Africa, Cape Town Opera, has never before toured the UK. On the strength of its glorious Gershwin it should be invited back — soon and often. At a time when Sir Willard White and others are setting up long-overdue projects to persuade young British black and Asian musicians that you don’t have to be white to make a career in opera, this ten-year-old company is a stunning exemplar — especially coming from a country where, only three decades ago, non-whites couldn’t even buy a ticket.

Christine Crouse’s vivacious staging is everything one had expected and hoped for. The Catfish Row of DuBose Heyward’s Charleston-based story has been transposed to another community with plenty of nuttin’: an apartheid-era Soweto township — although the rickety scaffolding, crumbling façades and corrugated shacks of Michael Mitchell’s set could be any shanty-town, any time.

What animates the stage are the epic crowd scenes, extrovert acting and the exuberant movement. Even in those great funeral chorales — heart-rending laments, with 50 voices weaving soulful improvisations over Gershwin’s chords and an on-stage blues trumpeter adding his anguished wail — the loose-limbed spirit of African dance is never far away. True, the production doesn’t exactly avoid cliché or sentimentality. There’s a raised-fist salute from the entire cast, for instance, as Xolela Sixaba’s great-hearted Porgy sets off at the final curtain to rescue Lisa Daltirus’s raddled Bess from degradation for the umpteenth time. But the show is done with such verve that you’d need a heart of concrete not to come out smiling.

Especially as many voices are sensational. Sixaba has a bass as big as his barrel chest; and Daltirus’s equally imposing and beautifully nuanced soprano hits top Bs with ease. Pretty Yende delivers as assured and stylish a Summertime as I have heard on stage, and Aubrey Lodewyk is also impressive as the ill-fated fisherman Jake.

Perhaps Victor Ryan Robertson’s Sportin’ Life and Ntobeko Rwanqa’s Crown could exude a touch more evil. They are, after all, the personifications of the drugs and gangs that blight Catfish Row. And, without subtitles, you have to work hard to make out what people are singing about.

But there are striking performances all over the stage. In the pit David Charles Abell obtains crisp playing from a fine band of British musicians. Catch the show in Cardiff until tomorrow; or at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre next week. There are semi-staged performances at the Royal Festival Hall in London on Monday and Tuesday.

Box office: 08700 402000

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