Resurrection par excellence: Handel’s Messiah, Merry Opera
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…
A fine cast sent adrift: SALT – fEast Theatre
“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…
Present for the future: A Hansel at Snape Maltings
“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…
Vice! Humour! Horror! And a happy ending… Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, RoughCast
One of the best things about Shakespeare is his endless capacity to surprise you. This is partly because he simply wrote so much: they may be more than four centuries…
Truly, madly, eclectically: Whole Punch, Waste Paper Opera
As you walk into the Rosemary Branch, it feels like any other smart North London pub, with a mouthwatering menu at eyewatering prices served in an atmosphere of mannered, steely…
Marauding before teatime: The Sagas of Noggin the Nog
“In the lands of the North where the black rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long, the men of the Northlands sit…
Clean, clear, and at a canter: Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore, Cambridge University Gilbert & Sullivan Society
On a clean, largely clear stage, dotted with a few barrels and benches, a tidy vegetable stand to one side and a pub sign, The Four Bears, to the other,…
Vivacious, Victorian, and very good fun: Ruddigore, Gilbert & Sullivan, Southgate Opera
We tend to think of Victorian society as morally strict, judgemental, and socially tense: and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore, while confirming all the above, savagely pokes fun at Victorian ideals…
Marriage, madness and all that jazz: The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart, Merry Opera
Every time someone updates The Marriage of Figaro, the most surprising thing is the resilience – the insistent, perennial relevance – of this opera’s inner social structure. Whether a production…
Making more monsters: Blood and Ice, Liz Lochhead, Sewell Barn Theatre
“Feminism is like the hoovering: you just have to keep doing it,” once said Liz Lochhead, former Makar (poet laureate) of Scotland; and Lochhead has been true to her word, with a…