The ENO’s revival of The Handmaid’s Tale, depicting the story of one ‘handmaiden’ Offred in this totalitarian, theonomic, and neo-Puritanical regime, is taken from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, veers away from too much direct graphic brutality but is a scary view of what might be, and is unremittingly beautiful in its stark no nonsense harshness.
A night of grim fascinations.
This haunting performance of Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony is a startlingly but soothing staging from the ENO yet again showing us what a dedicated team of people can do with imagination, flair and a determination to explore and share the very best of music with a diverse and invested audience.
Wonderful Life is a cosy, warm offering from the ENO, filled with astonishing bursts of beauty from a magnificent cast.. The unrequited hopes, longing and dreams at the heart of this Opera are overwhelmed on occasion by it being dipped in honey, it’s …Celestial gaslighting in action.
A successful night and a polished introduction to a remodelled Yeoman. Offering a fine evening of nostalgic semi-serious opera with its heart of G&S essential silliness maintained.
Lez Brotherston’s costume designs squirm with delight across Lizzie Clachan’s set is great fun, starting off worryingly school play like before exploding into a daft Arcadian swimming pool party on a Tarantino Cruise ship and then plunging into a seedy Soho peepshow world of London in the 1950’s.
The end, swift, inevitable and so terribly comes as it must and leaves everyone awkward, struggling with the death of Mimi, filled with regret and angst but my mind turned to Musetta, the only one who really cares for Mimi, who looks out for her, this is the real triumph of this production. To bring a focus not only to Mini and Musetta, but also the men’s inability to deal with them as equals. It’s pure understated glory is a wonderfully released production of Puccini.
A beautiful, thrilling, emotionally convincing evening in the presence of a splendid cast, and tremendous music, the ENO at its best.
Director James Robinson’s authentic, charming and emotionally connective production has managed that most marvelous of operatic tricks, Robins has presented us with a classic, done in a classic way. Un-fiddled with, authentic but manages with understatedly magnificent shift of focus to give us a wholly relevant and beautifully faithful production of this Gershwin Opera. I left enchanted.
This is an exceptional, lyrical, beautiful production of Gershwin’s classic opera and I’d urge you to go along and see it. Book now!
By avoiding real gore and giving us my little decapitated pony cartoon gooey gore we are forced to confront our own desires, our own expectations and here director Adena Jacobs’s new production for English National Opera has done something interesting. He’s given Salomé back her dignity, twisted, death obsessed, vain and impulsive she may be, but here she’s in control of it all. The others are all her toys, to play with, pull apart, or avoid being played with. She’s defiant and threatening, abused and abusive, swinging her aluminium baseball bat, making it clear she’s as much pitcher as catcher. It’s all about the gaze in the end, the ones not given and the ones stolen without permission. She’s the one to decide who gets satisfied and if it’s not to be her, then none of us will get any.
THE history of the stage musical Chess is as chequered as its current set design at London’s Coliseum. A successful stint in the West End from 1986 to 1989 was long overshadowed by a Broadway disastrous run of two months following vast rewrites as US producers insisted that the American must beat the Russian at the end of Act One, and not as the story originally dictated.
