Tag: English National Opera

The curtain lifts to reveal a land of fairies: trailing vines, enormous flowers, rainbow-tinted lights.  As W.S. Gilbert writes later on, it all looks like something from ‘Andersen’s library’. This…

David Alden may have dragged George Crabbe’s eighteenth-century Suffolk Borough into the twentieth century, updating Britten’s Peter Grimes to the time of its composition and emphasising post-war parochialism and hypocrisy,…

When he published his novel Bruges-la-Morte, in French, in 1892, the symbolist author George Rodenbach included within the narrative dozens of black-and-white topographical photographs of the Belgian city, largely images…

Those lavish costumes, the fiery sun and the troupe of jugglers continue to leave a vivid impression in Phelim McDermott’s sumptuous staging of Akhnaten.  Now in its second revival since…

Calixto Bieito’s grimly visualised Carmen has now reached its third revival.  First presented by ENO at the Coliseum in 2012 (and much travelled around Europe since its launch in Barcelona…

For want of a mislaid £8000, both George Bailey’s company and his own reputation are on the brink of ruin, and he himself stands on a literal precipice, ready to…

There were moments during the first night of Christof Loy’s production of Tosca at the Coliseum, which opened English National Opera’s 2022-23 season, when I thought that I might be…