Finders keepers: Belongings at Tête à Tête
We gather in a RADA basement to find two double rows of chairs facing one another across a long, thin central space; the layout faintly recalls a train carriage, the…
Love by design: ‘i’ – The Opera, The Waste Paper Opera Company
Not many operas credit their Neural Network Programming: but ‘i’ – The Opera, though recognisably and confidently an opera, thanks Janelle Shane and Dr Amita Kapoor of the University of…
Power hour: Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, The Hermes Experiment at Tête à Tête
The Winter’s Tale is surely one of Shakespeare’s cruellest tragedies: Leontes’ mistaken, yet unshakeable jealousy destroys family bonds and friendships alike, culminating in blasphemy as he refuses to accept the…
Divine passion: Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah, Grimeborn
Aylin Bozok’s productions of French opera for Grimeborn have all been marked by their elegance, restraint and psychological intensity. Bozok exchanges the orchestra for a piano accompaniment (played here with…
Packing all the punches: Edward Lambert’s The Art of Venus, Tête à Tête
“I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful…
Songs for a mad emperor: Sarah Toth’s Nero Monologues
Sarah Toth’s Nero Monologues is a pastiche opera, or pasticcio: this is a recognised form of opera making, used by Handel among others, where rather than writing an entirely fresh…
Unexpected Mozart in the bagging area: Così fan tutte, Merton Street Opera
Baseless Fabric Theatre have taken Mozart’s Così fan tutte to the streets this summer, in the most literal sense. Their exceptional cast of five fantastic singers, and three brave instrumentalists,…
Lust, silk and strangulation: Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy
Oscar Wilde never finished his play A Florentine Tragedy, an unsettling little story of the attempted seduction of a merchant’s wife by the local prince, and that prince’s death at the…
Duel of duos: Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri, Mascagni’s Zanetto
Mozart wears jeans under his brocade jacket and white wig, and is sometimes found playing with his mobile; Salieri’s ruffled shirt is under a dark modern suit, its folds not…
Nuttin’ much: tattered shreds of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess at Grimeborn
My suspicions should have been aroused by the fact that there was no programme for Porgy and Bess. The website had listed just two singers: Talia Cohen and Masimba Ushe. ‘Surely,’…