Eric greene

Say what you like about that Duke of Mantua, but he’s basically an OK sort of bloke. A bit of an arse, sure; the kind of TOWIE-adjacent, skinny jean-wearing reality star who’d commission photographic portraits of himself and recruit an entourage of hipsters and B-boy wannabes. But really, his worst crimes are against taste. His neon-lit crib might be hung with hideous religious art, but his parties are relatively free of the nudity, quaffing and non-consensual dry-humping that tends to characterise Act One of Verdi’s Rigoletto. In Femi Elufowoju Jr’s new staging for Opera North, the Duke lays on a hog roast for his posse but doesn’t forget to order

At the end of Birmingham Opera Company’s RhineGold, as the gods stood ready to enter Valhalla, Donner swung a baseball bat and summoned a rainbow bridge of human bodies — crawling, abject, before the new lords of creation. It was pretty much what we’ve come to expect from BOC’s founder Graham Vick, a director who never hints at a contemporary social message when he can ramraid our consciousness with one. Here, though, there was another twist of the knife. The human bridge was made up of delivery couriers, complete with branded cagoules and cycle helmets. Didn’t someone describe lockdown as ‘middle-class people hiding while working-class people bring them things?’. A