It’s been a spring tradition for several years now for English National Opera to present small-scale productions in various venues around London. But this year the Royal Opera followed suit, heading across the Thames to the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe. Ahead of the announcement of its solid but mainly safe 2014–15 season, we also learned that the ROH will present Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo in English at the Roundhouse in Camden next year — a rather more blatant incursion into ENO territory.
And if the company can take these small shows, which don’t even employ its orchestra, to NW1 and SE1, what’s to stop it taking them on tour beyond the M25? This would admittedly be trickier with this year’s offering, Francesco Cavalli’s 1644 L’Ormindo, a co-production with the Globe tailored to the authentic candles, trap doors and trapezes (and uncomfortable, cramped seating) of its new indoor theatre — a smaller, and distinctly less democratic space than the Globe itself: what few standing places there are are tucked away with restricted view, and had largely been abandoned by the end of the first-night performance.
One of the main things the show itself demonstrated was that the Royal Opera’s Kasper Holten is a far more effective director when denied the technical toys and pretentious tricks so indiscriminately applied to his recent Covent Garden Don Giovanni.
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