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…
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 old, but his plays still have the capacity to hit us afresh – particularly if, like Measure for Measure, they lurk quietly amidst his collected…
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 cool: but upstairs hides a magical surprise. An extra, private bar and tiny secret theatre over the top of the pub welcomes genuine creative risk-takers,…
“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 by their great log fire and they tell a tale…” Peter Firmin looked at the 12th-century Lewis Chessmen in the British Museum, and saw Nogs:…
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, a stormy sky lours menacingly at us, cradling a high, full moon at its corner. Cambridge University Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s Ruddigore starts as it…
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 of social and moral perfection, pushing stereotypes to extremes in order to satirise the question of private and public goodness from all sorts of different…