rape-of-lucretia-the-arcola-theatre-bettina-john-set-costume-design

Set and Costume Design Bettina John
Director Julia Burbach
Musical director and conductor Peter Selwyn
Lighting design Robert Price
With the Orpheus Sinfonia

About this production

As one of the centrepieces of the ‘Grimeborn’ festival 2018 at the Arcola Theatre, this award-winning production of “The Rape of Lucretia” shed an interesting new light on the narrative, the characters and, in this case, the audience too.

Although Benjamin Britten premiered The Rape of Lucretia at Glyndebourne in 1946, he didn’t want it to be a conventional opera-house opera. He sought small-scale intimacy that could travel to places opera didn’t always reach.

The work’s dimensions – eight singers, an orchestra of 12 players, 100 minutes – suit Grimeborn, the Arcola’s annual season of alternative opera: the space, like the opera, was compact, even claustrophobic, in an appropriate way.

Ronald Duncan’s libretto takes the audience to pre-Christian Rome, ruled over by Tarquinius. It is an intense piece, but one that is ideal for the intimacy of the staging at the Arcola. The complexities of the structure are more clear-cut when witnessed close up. The male and female chorus were holding the narrative together and they very much involve the audience; shaping the emotional response as they uncovered the events. It was almost as if the chorus was discovering it all for the first time themselves.

♦♦♦♦ Stars reviews
“thoroughly engaging”
“Bettina John creates a striking design within a moon-like circle of white fabric with six versatile red boxes and white bed linen”
“it is difficult to imagine a more powerful production of this gripping chamber opera”
“…boldly directed by Julia Burbach, a staff director at the Royal Opera House, and compactly designed by Bettin John.”

www.theguardian.com
http://exeuntmagazine.com
https://playstosee.com
https://www.standard.co.uk

——This production won the Offie Award 2018——