“Updated to the 1980s miners’ strike, New Sussex Opera’s production mixes political satire and period style along with a sense of enjoyment in the work’s send-up of opera seria.” – Planet Hugill

“I have seen two previous presentations of John Frederick Lampe’s burlesque opera, and enjoyed them both greatly, but this new production by New Sussex Opera is the most inventive and exhilarating by far.

“Carey’s text contains contemporary satirical resonances that would surely be lost on a modern audience. So director Paul Higgins has updated the period of the piece to the 1980s miners’ strike, which was eventually defeated by prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Splendidly arrayed in a magnificently characteristic Thatcherite costume, complete with enormous handbag, the former PM, sung by Robert Gildon, is in this instance the ‘dragon’ defeated by Professor Moore.

There’s fine playing on period instruments from the Bellot Ensemble in the pit, with conductor Toby Purser maintaining a taut grip on the score’s unstoppable momentum.” George Hall

“The production steers a happy medium between raucous fun and sincere sentiment, without taking itself too seriously, and winningly offers the rare chance to encounter what was a huge hit on the 18th-century London stage.” Curtis Rogers – Classical Source

What joy to see the hit of London’s 1737 season—even more popular in its day than The Beggar’s Opera—on stage where it belongs. Henry Carey’s libretto, full of outrageous rhymes and double entendres, lampoons patrician politics as well as heroic drama, while John Frederick Lampe (Handel’s bassoonist) provides a pastiche of his master’s opera and oratorio styles, with a lilting directness all his own. The combination makes for great, through-sung English comic opera. With no surtitles to pre-empt the laughter, New Sussex Opera’s touring production proved an unusually immersive experience: such piquantly absurd lines as ‘But to hear the children mutter/When they lost their toast and butter’ (in the heroine Margery’s gorgeous siciliana) hit their mark with Blackheath Halls’ receptive audience, focused fully on the stage and the singers.

With a nod to Carey’s Yorkshire setting and political satire, the director Paul Higgins relocated the action to Orgreave during the 1984 miners’ strike, with the drunken hero Moore of Moore Hall transformed to a teacher-training academic, and the dragon—how could it be otherwise?— presented as a handbag-wielding Margaret Thatcher. The grand battle took place in a local pub, with Moore using his red gown as a bullfighter’s cape, and the final kick to the dragon’s rump administered by one of his long-suffering mature students, a neat little addition played (for this night only) by the director himself. With the villagers becoming a full-blown choral society for the finale, ‘Sing, sing and rorio/An oratorio’, while clutching copies of Handel’s Messiah, the straightforward production did everything required.

Musical matters were in Toby Purser’s equally sensitive hands. The conductor urged light, bright accompaniment from the period instruments of the Bellot Ensemble,
augmented by antiphonal horns and trumpets for the overture and climactic numbers, which enabled the singers to project Carey’s pithy text with the necessary clarity. Magnus Walker’s clean-limned tenor Moore won the palm for diction, despite some vocal occlusion above the stave. Charlotte Badham’s jealously volatile Mauxalinda deployed her distinctive mezzo-soprano and emotional focus well, especially in the infamous ‘cat fight’ duet with Ana Beard Fernandez—whose creamy soprano consistently impressed as
Margery, bringing the requisite vocal virtuosity into play and promoting a plausibly 1980s student-heroine. The bass Robert Gildon doubled trade-unionist Gaffer Gubbins and the drag Dragon to solid effect. A small but enthusiastic village chorus, marshalled in Lampe’s unusual, tripartite treble-treble-bass division, completed the team for this genial – and authentically congenial – revival.  

Christopher Webber – Opera