Rigoletto, 2023
Opera Holland Park
Conductor: Lee Reynolds | Movement Director: Caitlin Fretwell Walsh | Designer: Neil Irish | Lighting Designer: Jake Wiltshire
Cast: Stephen Gadd, Alison Langer, Alessandro Scotto di Luzio, Elgan Llŷr Thomas, Simon Wilding, Hannah Pedley, Georgia Mae Bishop, Benson Wilson, Joanna Harries, Mike Bradley, Matthew Stiff, Jacob Phillips, Samuel Snowden, Annie George & Opera Holland Park Chorus
★★★★
a convention-busting production with a female gaze... Cecilia Stinton’s new staging provides fresh insight into this problematic canon opera
"Cecilia Stinton’s new staging of Rigoletto, opening the season at Opera Holland Park, is the third production I’ve seen in under a fortnight in which a talented female director grapples with a problematic canonic opera. Following Deborah Warner’s Wozzeck (ROH) and Mariame Clément’s Don Giovanni (Glyndebourne), Stinton’s Rigoletto situates the libidinous activities of the Duke of Mantua and his court in a Bullingdon-style establishment in the Jazz Age. OHP’s stagings generally tack to the traditional, but Stinton’s (designed by Neil Irish, lit by Jake Wiltshire) is one of the most thought- and convention-provoking I’ve seen at the W8 address".
Barry Millington, The Evening Standard
★★★★
Opera Holland Park serves up the most memorable of recent Rigolettos... with the action shrewdly shifted from Mantua to an Oxbridge college, this expertly sung Verdi staging is a great success
"Cecilia Stinton’s ingenious staging moves the action of Verdi’s opera to an Oxbridge college, and already during the prelude we witness an unpleasant bit of Bullingdon Club-style initiation. In Neil Irish’s designs, the stage is dominated by dark-panelled bookshelves filled not only with fine bindings but sporting cups and trophies. Rowing oars, cricket whites and flappers’ dresses complete an interwar scene that also has more recent resonance, and for once even the theatre’s backdrop of Holland House looks just right, evoking a college façade… Stinton’s imaginative stagecraft makes ingenious connections, not least when the offstage band in the first scene is replaced by the sound of a crackly 78-rpm record playing jazzed-up Verdi… It’s not always easy to convincingly update the opera’s setting at the 16th-century court of the womanising Duke of Mantua, where the hunchbacked jester Rigoletto is trying to protect his beloved only daughter Gilda. Stinton succeeds especially cleverly with Rigoletto, here perhaps the college porter, making his disability an old-fashioned prosthetic leg (his medals suggesting a war injury)... an evening that adds up to the most memorable of recent Rigolettos".
John Allison, The Telegraph