Less means more...
Opera: La Traviata, Leeds Grand Theatre/ touring ****

Opera North's autumn season is a bold triptych of new productions - La Traviata, Katya Kabanova and Don Giovanni - designed to make the most of a decidedly finite budget: what would normally be spent on one new show and two revivals has been stretched to cover all three in spare, functional settings. So Annabel Arden's piercing Traviata makes do with a single all-purpose set by Nicky Gillebrand. There's no clutter, no excess - and the drama is all the more focused and potent for it.

It is not the best-sung Traviata you will ever hear, but certainly one of the most intelligent and emotionally truthful. Arden always gets wonderful acting out of her casts, and Janis Kelly (Violetta) and Tom Randle (Alfredo) know exactly how to use a stage and to make every gesture and phrase carry meaning to the audience. On Thursday everything was slow to catch fire. The first act needs a bit more swagger and glitz, and though the Opera North chorus and the conductor Richard Farnes conjured up a convincingly rowdy party atmosphere, the virtues of Kelly's performance are not to be found in the extrovert displays of brilliance in showstoppers like the brindisi - her voice doesn't have the muscle for that - but in the myriad ways she touches the core of Violetta's personality, with the slightest movement here, a beautifully shaded moment there.

All that subtlety is brought into play from the second act onwards. This is Violetta conceived as a mature woman who has taken an impulsive younger lover, and that lends an extra resonance to her confrontation with Germont père (a honest, humane portrayal from Keith Latham).

The generation gaps are skewed slightly: the relationship between her and Alfredo's father is more complex and more credible than convention plays it, and Alfredo's humiliation of her at Flora's party (with a feisty performance from Sarah Pring as Flora) all the more distressing. The last act is magnetic: with the simplest means all the strands are brought together and Kelly's performance, lacking in histrionics, is compelling. This Traviata is a wonderful example of opera as wholly involving theatre, not just a showcase for vocal prowess - Andrew Clements

• In Leeds (0113 245 6014) until October 9, then touring to London (Sadler's Wells), Newcastle, Manchester, Nottingham and Hull

Legless in dustbins...

Theatre: Endgame, Barbican Theatre, London ****

Beckett is not only the poet of terminal stages: he also has an extraordinary capacity to impose on an audience. This performance of Endgame was prefaced by cries, shouts and wolf-whistles from an exuberant school party; within seconds, however, Clov's comic business with the ladder had absorbed the nervous hilarity that was finally silenced by Beckett's stark imagery and obsession with the process of dying.

Two things mark out Antoni Libera's Dublin Gate production from other recent revivals of this bleak masterpiece. One is an unmistakeable Irishness, which in no way inhibits the play's universality. The relationship between Alan Stanford's testy, blind, chairbound Hamm and Barry McGovern's long-legged, Phiz-cartoon Clov is not just that of master and servant but has echoes of the truculent inter-dependence you find in Yeats and Synge.

Even particular words give the play a local habitation: McGovern's reference to a "smithereen" has an Irish ring and Stanford's pronunciation of "old stancher", referring to the large handkerchief with which he drapes his face, carries punning, Beckettian echoes of staunchness.

But Libera's production also heightens the play's self-referential theatricality. Robert Ballagh's design consists of a receding, grey-walled box that looks like a stage-set. And one notices how often the characters, as in Godot, review their situation: when Stanford's Hamm cries "We're not beginning to. . . to. . . mean something?" the line refers not only to the absurdity of existence but draws attention to the actor's ironic self-awareness.

Post-Ibsenite naturalism turns the audience into eavesdroppers: in Beckett we are complicit in the experience and are constantly reminded that a play, with its built-in evanescence, is an all too apt metaphor for life.

My only cavil with Libera's production is that Bill Golding's Nagg and Pauline Flanagan's Nell, legless in dustbins, lack an overpowering sense of antique decrepitude. What I like about the production is the way the despair emerges through comedy: as Nell says, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness." Stanford's Hamm has both a Shakespearean grandeur and a total helplessness which makes him richly comic and McGovern's Clov, with his clumping, splay-footed walk and unconscious delight in paradox ("If I could kill him I'd die happy") is a brilliant study in exhausted animation. As so often, you emerge buoyed up rather than spiritually lowered by Beckett's bracing pessimism - Michael Billington

• Final performance today. Box office: 0171-638 8891

Expect the unexpected...

Jazz: Avishai Cohen, Pizza Express, Dean Street, London ****

Live gigs are promotional vehicles for albums in the pop world, more of an end in themselves in jazz, where they're there for what isn't expected to happen as much as for what is. The reputation of Avishai Cohen, the Israeli double-bassist, has been built on some exceptions to this pattern. His two albums for Chick Corea's Stretch Records label made his London season an eagerly-awaited event, less for the improvisors in his ensemble (the usual stimulus for jazz anticipation) and more for the originality of the concepts he drops them into and the quality of those discs' compositions.

Cohen's music draws together old Sephardic folk melodies, Latin jazz echoing his work in Chick Corea's bands, bumpy Thelonious Monkish figures, and a taut, harmonically subtle ensemble feel that occasionally recalls Herbie Hancock's sextet in the 70s.

He often begins pieces with powerful bass overtures, opening with El Capitan and the Ship At Sea from his Devotion album, a mix of choppy time changes and a developing Cuban vibe dedicated to piano veteran Horace Silver. It was followed by The Gift, and this time the unaccompanied bass solo revealed the extent of Cohen's technical and imaginative resources, a succession of emphatic and driving runs mingled with fluttering staccato sounds like a tabla, turning into a repeating vamp with which Amos Hoffman's oud - a sonorous lute-like instrument - began to chime and clatter. The eloquence of this dialogue sometimes contrasted with less distinctive and decisive voicings for the horns.

But Cohen's other substantial strength as a writer and bandleader, the ability to make a Cuban feel work within melodic and rhythmic traditions thousands of miles apart, worked like a charm. He was formidably assisted in this by his ebullient, primary-colours pianist Jason Lindner and by a drummer, Jeff Ballard, who can play most of the separate elements of a full Latin percussion section all by himself - John Fordham

• Until Sunday. Details: 0171-439 8722