Plain English: June 2013 Archives

Have you ever been assaulted by the stage lighting of a production? In the sixty-plus years since I saw my first play and opera (Carmen at the Cincinnati Zoo!), this is the first time I have felt physically threatened by a lighting designer, Mimi Jordan Sherin, who has lit Richard Jones's otherwise imaginative, rewarding revival of Benjamin Britten's Gloriana, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

June 25, 2013 2:40 PM | | Comments (0)
Have you ever been assaulted by the stage lighting of a production? In the sixty-plus years since I saw my first play and opera (Carmen at the Cincinnati Zoo!), this is the first time I have felt physically threatened by a lighting designer, Mimi Jordan Sherin, who has lit Richard Jones's otherwise imaginative, rewarding revival of Benjamin Britten's Gloriana, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

June 25, 2013 2:40 PM | | Comments (0)

The last "Ring" I saw was last autumn's revival of the Keith Warner production at Covent Garden. As in 2005/6 I had intended to write a book about seeing every Ring cycle produced in a single year, I not only saw the Bayreuth Ring in summer, 2006, but the earlier Manaus and Adelaide Rings. I've seen at least three different Bayreuth productions (each more than once) over the years, and have seen every production in London and Edinburgh in the last couple of decades, including the feeble Russian staging - my first ever being the ROH production in 1970. I relished the 1994-95 Richard Jones, unpopular though it was with my colleagues. Someone recently asked me how many Rings I've seen, and I realised that I couldn't answer without going through my old diaries and calendars. So the answer is: quite a few.

            But I've never enjoyed one more than Martin and Lizzie Graham's Longborough Ring, whose first complete cycle has just ended.

 



 

June 23, 2013 12:19 PM | | Comments (6)

In a former henhouse, at Longborough, deep in the Cotswold countryside, a very ambitious Ring cycle is shaping up. What, I asked myself, would its bombastic, luxury-loving author and composer make of it?

            How would Wagner, who ordered his undergarments from a maker of bespoke women's lingerie, feel about designer Kjell Torriset's simple, effective, but hardly elegant costumes - of rough cotton rather than the silk the Master liked to feel next to his own skin?

            How would the man who also built an opera house for himself, with all the then- current theatrical bells and whistles, feel about the basic, but comfortable auditorium, and the stage with Ben Ormerod's excellent, but limited lighting effects possibilities? And what would the man who called for circles of fire, dragons and rainbow bridges think about Mr. Torriset's (increasingly ingenious and impressive, superb but modest) special effects.

            Above all, how would Wagner react to the intimate atmosphere of Longborough, where you can see the singers' faces from every seat in the house?

            

What would he make of presenting his Festival opera, his four-day affair, as a chamber opera?



June 20, 2013 10:13 AM | | Comments (0)

It's a far cry from the Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney Hollywood movie where the two kids say "Let's put on a show," but the start of the 2013 Ring Cycle just outside the Cotswold village of Longborough has the same defiant D.I.Y. attitude.

Martin and Lizzie Graham have been thinking about Wagner's operas for 30 years, and in 1998 they mounted - in a converted hen-house on their farm - their first, but miniaturised, Rhinegold. Now the shed has become a rural opera house, with all the appropriate 

theatrical paraphernalia, and (perfectly comfortable) red-plush seats rescued from the renovation of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.


June 17, 2013 4:55 PM | | Comments (0)

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This page is a archive of recent entries written by Plain English in June 2013.

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