In a small seaside town in Spain, on a grubby campsite near the beach, lust and murder – opera’s two key ingredients – are fomenting under the sweltering sun, pulling a smalltime official, a successful novelist, an unsuccessful poet, a homeless opera singer and a champion figure skater into a taut net of mutual suspicion…
Partenope is a perfect comic storm of seduction, jealousy, fidelity and infidelity, gender-bending and downright skulduggery, anchored in the sharp human tension of true love. Many of these tropes are familiar Handel fare, but Partenope is set apart by the unnerving genuineness of its emotional dynamics, which ripple and transform from scene to scene, as the game of…
Heavyweight opera behemoth /institution La traviata is always in need of agile, intelligent reworkings like Longborough’s intriguing new production. Daisy Evans’ incisive update makes Violetta Valéry a Hollywood filmstar in the late Fifties, taking inspiration from the celebrated, yet tortured life of Marilyn Monroe. While this has certainly been done before (memorably by Grange Park Opera in 2014), Evans’…
Bruno Ravella’s fast-paced direction for Garsington Opera honours Falstaff’s intense immediacy with a clear emphasis on dynamic physical and visual comedy underpinned by taut stagecraft, while still allowing time for its vital moments of pathos to breathe on stage in this subtle, elegant production. Henry Waddington’s dextrous characterisation means Falstaff’s connection to Rigoletto, another Verdi tortured clown, feels unmistakeable.…
In 1963, Robert Silverberg published To See The Invisible Man, a dystopian short story in which an individual is punished for “the crime of coldness” by a judicially enforced loneliness, a subject which Emily Howard has turned into opera as an Aldeburgh Festival commission. While this production is strong and vibrant, Emily Howard’s opera itself is…
It’s not every summer England sees a brand new garden opera festival coming to life. Waterperry Opera Festival is not only new, but innovative and ambitious, opening with a range of pieces broad enough to welcome a wide audience, deconstructing and disrupting the classic English summer opera formula (though picnics are still definitely encouraged). Four…
This whirling, high-energy collaboration between Iford Arts and Opera Della Luna packs every possible punch in a furiously creative evening of constant costume changes, an endlessly reassembling set, and above all a blazing sense of commitment from Jeff Clarke’s fine cast. Candide’s endless, troubled travels feel like a parable of life itself, as he learns the…
We gather in the glorious Arts and Crafts surroundings of Our Lady Star of the Sea, Lowestoft, one of Suffolk’s most beautiful Catholic churches, on a summery April evening while the kittiwakes scream overhead. Merry Opera’s cast gradually file in, dressed in everyday clothes: twelve men and women from all walks of life, approaching the…
“This strip of saltmarsh, not quite the land, not quite the sea”: the wet, uncompromising North Norfolk coastline forms the setting for Jeremy Page’s 2008 novel Salt, newly adapted for the stage by Robin McLoughlin, who also stars in fEast’s touring production as the charismatic Kipper, a mysterious, defensive man with a fascination for chemistry,…
“One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!” George Eliot (in Middlemarch) points us to the social circularity behind a gift: and this Hansel given at Snape was a perfect example, with three exceptional musicians, Julius Drake, Mark Padmore and Krzysztof Chorzelski, ‘giving back’ their skills in performance in aid of two charities…