The engaging Mr Polly: tenor Robin Bailey shines in the title role of Edward Longstaff's new opera based on H.G. Wells at Tête à Tête

Edward Longstaff: The History of Mr. Polly: Part One - Robin Bailey - Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival at the Cockpit (Photo Claire Shovelton)

Edward Longstaff: The History of Mr. Polly: Part One; Robin Bailey, Laurie Slavin, Jack Holton, Maya Kumana, Elizabeth Lynch, Emily McCarthy, Sophia Jin, Hailey West, director: Stuart Barker, piano: John Longstaff; Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival at the Cockpit
Reviewed 9 September 2026

The first half of a work in progress, an ambitious opera based on H.G. Wells's comic novel, benefits from Robin Bailey's easy charm in the title role in a workshop performance that proved wonderfully engaging

H.G. Wells's picaresque comic novel The History of Mr. Polly is not the most obvious subject for an opera. Wells tells the story with almost Dickensian relish, but the central character is a bumbling anti-hero and achieves his goal despite himself. He is lacking in self-confidence and education, his most distinctive characteristic is verbal, his invention of descriptive words. Wells's book has been adapted as film and TV series multiple times, but this seems to be the first operatic adaptation. Though the musical Half a Sixpence was based on Wells's 1905 book Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul.

As part of Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival at the Cockpit, composer Edward Longstaff presented The History of Mr. Polly: Part One with piano accompaniment by John Longstaff. There will be a Part Two, and the work will be orchestrated. At the Cockpit we saw a production directed by Stuart Barker with designes by Valassia Barbouti and Maria J Damia Patino. Robin Bailey played Mr Polly, with Laurie Slavin as Parsons, Jack Holton as Mr Johnson, Maya Kumana as Mrs Johnson, Elizabeth Lynch as Ma Larkins, Emily McCarthy as Annie, Sophia Jin as Miriam and Hailey West as Christabel.

Edward Longstaff studied at Royal Holloway and Goldsmiths. He spent 31 years teaching at the Purcell School and now writes full-time. The History of Mr. Polly is his second opera. His first opera, Iphigenia was written for young voices and premiered at the Purcell School.

Edward Longstaff: The History of Mr. Polly: Part One - Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival at the Cockpit (Photo Claire Shovelton)

The opera preserved the book's structure, beginning in media res with Polly unhappy with his lot and planning to set fire to the shop and kill himself. Then things jumped back to the beginning, and Part One of the opera finished with the fire, only for Polly to turn into an accidental hero. Wells's book has a lot of plot and despite Longstaff's clever excisions and compressions (he wrote his own libretto), there was still a lot of plot and significant number of characters.

Scotland's tragic queen: Louisa Petaï & Louis Mander's Eight Days evokes the last days of Mary, Queen of Scots at Tête à Tête

Eight Days: Louis Mander - Louisa Petaï - Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival at the Cockpit (Photo: Claire Shovelton)

Eight Days: Louis Mander, Louisa Petaï; Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival at the Cockpit
Reviewed 9 September 2026

An impressive achievement as Louis Mander's evocative and dark-toned music colours and shapes Louisa Petaï's remarkable incarnation of the tragic queen. 

When it comes to opera, composer Louis Mander is remarkably prolific: his latest, Eight Days is his fourteenth and I caught his operetta The Dowager's Oyster at Grimeborn way back in 2016 [see my review]. Eight Days is for soprano and chamber ensemble, with a libretto by Louisa Petaï who also sings the solo role. The opera debuted on 9 September 2026 at the Cockpit Theatre, as part of Tête à Tête. Louis Mander conducted with an ensemble featuring Kiana Umali Garvey (violin), Theadora Griffiths (viola), Max Chen (cello), Jack Cherry (double bass). And the work was produced by Cantata Dramatica.

Eight Days is a chamber piece with the title referring to the final eight days of Mary, Queen of Scots' life. Petaï's libretto is based on Mary's letters and the work is divided into short scenes each representing one of the days, and each having a particular theme - Mary's satirical embroidery of a cat and mouse (referring to her relationship with Elizabeth), a prayer for her son (King James VI of Scotland), her relations with her husbands (Lord Darnley and the Earl of Bothwell), and a final plea to her brother-in-law, Henri, King of France (Mary's first husband was Henri's elder brother).

The Breaking Point: worlds connected by questions of pressure, identity & the forces that shape human behaviour. Contemporary opera from Royal Academy of Music composers at Tête à Tête

Four worlds connected by questions of pressure, identity and the forces that shape human behaviour: The Breaking Point brings together four distinct works in a single evening of contemporary music theatre. Created by Royal Academy of Music composers working with emerging librettists, the four operas are being presented as two double bills at The Cockpit Theatre on 19 September 2026 as part of Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival 2026.

The cycle grew out of a shared sense among the artists that many of the pressures shaping contemporary life — ecological anxiety, cultural erasure, media saturation, ambition and isolation — are often discussed in political or intellectual terms, but less often experienced directly through performance. The Breaking Point asks what happens when these forces cease to be distant ideas and enter personal relationships, private spaces and individual lives. Drawing on international perspectives and distinct musical languages, the four works bring contrasting operatic styles and different theatrical approaches together under a shared theme.

• Broken Ivy: music by Florence Lloyd, libretto by Viv Bayliss. Florence Lloyd is a British composer whose work centres on vocal writing, electronics and cross-disciplinary performance, drawing on their interests in theatre, dance, poetry and fashion. Recent commissions include works for CHROMA Ensemble, ADW Trio and Leeds Song.
• Fence Off! music by Ruben Doda, libretto by Rebekah Ann King. Ruben Doda is an Italian composer and multi-instrumentalist based in London. His music has been performed internationally, including Antigone by PHACE Ensemble at the Vienna Contemporary Composers Festival and The Forge, inspired by Goya’s painting, at The Frick Collection, New York, in 2026.
• Sing4 Nok6, and Other Broken Things: music by Kwun Ho (Jerry Fryderyk) Ng, libretto by Courtney Cousins. Kwun Ho (Jerry Fryderyk) Ng is a Hong Kong composer and new-music conductor whose work explores cultural and cross-cultural identity through contemporary approaches to Classical traditions. His particular interest in Cantonese vocal music culminates in the chamber opera SING4 NOK6, and Other Broken Things, which interweaves Cantonese and English within a spatial musical setting.
• Meet the Philips:  music by Alessandro MacKinnon-Botti, libretto by Wilkie Robson.  Alessandro MacKinnon-Botti is a British composer, conductor and keyboard player whose work spans concert music, opera and theatre. In 2024, he won the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra Composers’ Competition, leading to the premiere of Voice-leading for solo beatboxer and orchestra. The orchestra subsequently commissioned King of Kings, a companion piece to Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon, in 2025.

Further information from the Tête à Tête
 website. 

Eight Days: Louis Mander & Louisa Petaï's new opera focuses on Mary, Queen of Scots' final days using her own words

Mary, Queen of Scots remains a character who continues to fascinate and inspire composers. Composers as diverse as Schumann and Richard Wagner set her poetry. Donizetti's opera though historically inaccurate continues to hold the operatic stage, and more recent composers inspired by her have included Thea Musgrave. Brett Dean's new opera, Of One Blood which examines the rivalry between Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, debuted at the Bavarian State opera last month and will be travelling to Santa Fe Opera, State Opera South Australia, and Garsington.

In September, composer Louis Mander will be debuting his own work inspired by the tragic queen, Eight Days. Written for soprano and chamber ensemble, the opera will be performed by Louisa Petaï who has also written the libretto based on Mary's letters. 

Louis Mander is no stranger to opera having written his first one in 2006. His recent output has included a comic operetta, The Dowager's Oyster (2015/16) and The Waves (2024) based on Virginia Woolf's novel. 

Eight Days debuts at Tête à Tête on 9 September 2026 before travelling to St Mary’s Church, Fotheringhay, the very location where Mary would have spent her last night before her execution at Fotheringhay Castle. The castle was almost totally demolished in the 1630s and little remains. Fotheringhay Church was begun as a collegiate foundation by King Edward III in 1430 though only the nave, aisles and octagonal tower remain of the original building.

On 1st February 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots, after twenty years of captivity, still remains imprisoned in Fotheringhay castle.  Unbeknownst to her, Queen Elizabeth I - her own cousin - has signed her death warrant.  She has only eight days left to live. The opera's libretto draws upon contemporary historical accounts and uses Mary's own words above all as Mary braces herself for death, yet still a queen, deliberately sows the seeds for her own enduring legacy as martyr and icon. 

Further information from Louis Mander's website,  

Fantasy & Fairytales, a return of the Opera Festival & The Rain Show: a busy year for Tête à Tête

Launched in 2007, Tête à Tête will be 30 next year! But this year the company shows no sign of slacking. From 3 to 6 July the latest chapter in their longstanding partnership with the Royal College of Music features five new short operas. Fantasy & Fairytales features new work created for young audiences; each opera opens out a different fantastical world, drawing on folklore and storytelling to explore human experience. The creative team includes director Bill Bankes-Jones (artistic director of Tête à Tête), conductor Michael Rosewell and designer Sarah Jane Booth.

Fantasy & Fairytales includes Daniel Musashi’s Ogga Loggas, in which ancient forests and age-old curses teach us the importance of looking after our world, and Lasha Kharkhelauri’s Ramona, a Georgian tale of love and upheaval set inside a puppet theatre as well as Asher Joyce’s Three Lives, Deniz Dortok’s The Boy Who Went to Find Fear and Ruvin Meda’s The Nightingale and the Rose.

Further details from the RCM website. 

And from 8 to 20 September, the company's flagship Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival returns to the Cockpit Theatre, Marylebone for new operas that include a quadruple bill of young composers. There are operas on the last eight days of Mary Queen of Scots, Frankenstein, and a Cornish-language setting of Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott. There is an international collaboration spanning Finland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Germany, opera from a Ukrainian composer, a Hong Kong artist, an opera exploring relationships between people and their languages, incorporating Cantonese 

Further details from the Tête à Tête website.

And just to show that the company spreads its wings wider than London, last month (20 to 25 April) they presented The Rain Show in Tyneside and Cornwall.  The Rain Show was a collaboration between British and Kenyan artists bringing workshops and performance into schools across North Tyneside and Cornwall. Delivered in partnership with Across Arts (led by producer Helene Mathiesen), and Baraka Opera Kenya, the project introduced young people to opera through cross-cultural exchange and culminated in a public performance on 25 April. The creative team featured librettist Nami Shah and composer Shaka Lwaki.

Further details from the Tête à Tête website. 

The Game: director Leo Doulton on blending opera with interactive storytelling and video game at this year's Tête à Tête

Director and writer Leo Doulton has quite a varied practice, he is the marketing director of Tête à Tête, whilst as a writer he has a particular interest in interactive theatre and we caught We Sing/I Sang at Tête à Tête in 2020 [see my review]. This Summer he was assistant director on Wagner's Die Walküre, at Longborough Festival Opera and on 28 September he directs the premiere of Elif Karlidağ and Sam Redway's The Game at the Cockpit Theatre as part of Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival, with singers Eliran Kadoussi, Lore Lixenberg, Hestor Dart, and Rachel Roper, actor Mayra Stergiou, and Edo Frenkel as musical director, with game and AV design by Utkucan Eken.

The Game is described as 'blending opera with modern interactive storytelling and propelled by an experimental, narrative-driven, first-person video game', so is it an opera at all?

Leo is firm that The Game is an opera, he describes the set-up as depicting someone who is at The Cockpit and who starts playing a game and finds that they can't escape. On-stage there is the person playing The Game along with three singers playing the assets of the game, with a commanding off-stage voice. In many ways the piece is an absurdist comedy, examining the human situation and Leo is interested in examining how we fit into the world, and also how gameplay fits into the world. He is also relishing the challenge of doing the work at The Cockpit.

Ghost: Emma Wheeler & Anna Appleby's life experience as queer, neurodivergent women has inspired their new electronica-opera premiering at Tête à Tête

If You Died, Who Would You Choose To Haunt?

Manchester-based composer and songwriter Anna Appleby's work includes a chamber opera-ballet Citizens of Nowhere in 2016/17, an opera, Drought in 2022, for the BBC Philharmonic and an award-winning collaborative youth opera for Glyndebourne, Pay the Piper. But she also has a performance alter-ego called Norrisette, the moniker under which she writes, records, performs and produces electronic music and contemporary songs, as well as starting a regular music night in collaboration with Industries called FLUFF which is a platform for queer electronic artists. FLUFF was featured in the Guardian for its role in the underground music scene in Manchester.

Now Appleby and classically trained singer, Emma Wheeler have created Ghost, a new electronica-opera premiering at Tête à Tête Festival on the 28th September 2024, at the Cockpit Theatre, London. It features just the two performers, who have also written and composed the show together, and you can expect to hear everything from synthesizers and hyperpop to haunting vocals and fast-paced comic monologues.

Ghost is built on Emma Wheeler and Anna Appleby's life experience as queer, neurodivergent women - stories that have not historically been told in opera. This opera is the coming-together of two musical worlds, from Appleby's Glyndebourne and BBC Philharmonic opera composition history and Emma Wheeler's rich mezzo vocals, to Norrisette and Rosé Gold's grungy underground electronica and DIY drag fashion extravagance. 

Prepare for a ghost story like no other!

Full details from the Tête à Tête website.
 

A month of essential listening - Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival is back with another visionary festival

Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival returns later this month with its visionary festival of new opera, with events from 24 August to 29 September 2024, a month of essential listening. The festival opens with Will Gardner and Matthew Green's second opera The Prisoner (a work which won the Stephen Oliver Award) at the Royal College of Music's Britten Theatre. The remainder of the festival is at The Cockpit Theatre, Marylebone with the exception of Catherine Kontz' 12 Hours at Kings College, London, which will be a 6-hour extract of a marathon 12-hour performance for voice and electronics.

Performers include eight returning artists and 17 teams who are joining the festival for the first time. Returning alumni include composer Will Gardner (with The Prisoner), mezzo-soprano Rosie Middleton (who performs in Catherine Kontz's 12 Hours and Elif Karlidag and Sam Redway's The Game), and composer Edward Lambert who presents a double bill The Parting / Buster’s Trip based on the texts of Federico García Lorca.

Other highlights include Guy Harries' QueerLove, a celebration of LGBTQ+ relationships through the medium of the love letter, Frank Horvat and Stacie Dunlop's Letters, a solo performance exploring a difficult relationship with a troubled parent, Josh Kaye, Hestor Dart, and Amy Kearsley's You Can't Kill the Spirit, based on the testimonials of female activists of the 1960s and inspired by the 1982 human chain around Greenham Common, and Madeleine Brooks' I Shot Mussolini, a true story led by the direct descendant of Violet Gibson, who very nearly single-handedly changed the course of the twentieth century.

Visiting productions from overseas include Vicky Nizri and Cristina Pardo's A Life of One’s Own, an opera from Mexico about the story of a young woman migrating to build a life for herself, featuring Sephardic music, porte renaud's Andrias Scheuchzeri, an ecological science-fiction project from France, Margarida Gonçalves' The Acts of Brízida Vaz, inspired by renowned Portuguese poet and playwright Gil Vicente and rooted in Portuguese tradition and Gaia Aloisi and Fabrizio Funari's Aqua Tofana, an Italy-UK co-production centred on 17th Century apothecarist Giulia Tofana’s lethal liquid invention.

Rendevous with Revenge features a triple bill, originally written as part of the Royal Academy of Music Opera Makers project, with music and words by Sarah Marze, Yan Ee Toh, Adam Zolty, Ade Bademosi, Noah McCreadie, and Philippa Lawford.

Full details from the festival website.

A half hour full of switchback changes, genuine surprise & delight: Rania Chrysostomou & Sarah Parkin's On Being Vocal at Tête à Tête

Rania Chrysostomou & Sarah Parkin: On Being Vocal - Sarah Parkin - Tête à Tête at the Cockpit (Photo: Claire Shovelton)

Rania Chrysostomou & Sarah Parkin: On Being Vocal; Sarah Parkin, director: Sarah Parkin & Rania Chrysostomou, filmmaker: Catherine Valve; Tête à Tête at the Cockpit
Reviewed by Florence Anna Maunders, 10 September 2023

Intriguing and intense operatic exploration of women's hidden stories

A truly collaborative creation between the British/Cypriot composer Rania Chrysostomou and the Canadian/French soprano Sarah Parkin, On Being Vocal, was presented on 10 September 2023 at the Cockpit as part of Tête à Tête: the Opera Festival. This short opera managed to squeeze an enormous amount of content and variety into a running time just over half an hour. In the setting of a women's support group, and aided by Catherine Valve's projected film, Parkin took on the six different roles, each with its own distinct characterisation and musical voice.

Starting with a nice touch of scene setting – a short film showing the women arriving one-at-a-time to a semicircle of chairs, the action moved to the stage itself, the same arc of chairs recreated, in the real. Initially inhabiting the character of the group leader, and then the other women, Parkin moved from chair to chair, using a few props to clearly establish her multiple roles, each of which had its own aria or song, so that in this manner the work's structure was delineated by the changing characterisations.

The atmosphere, history & dangers of the sandbank: Michael Betteridge's Voices of the Sands

Michael Betteridge: Voices of the Sands - Esther Swift - Tête-à-Tête: the Opera Festival (Photo Claire Shovelton)

Michael Betteridge: Voices of the Sands; Sarah Parkin, Donna Lennard, Suzie Purkiss, Esther Swift, director: Lucy Bradley, video: Chuck Blue Lowry; Tête-à-Tête : the Opera Festival at the Cockpit
Reviewed by Florence Anna Maunders, 2 September 2022

A visually stunning semi-staged production of Michael Betteridge's dramatic cantata about the history and folklore of the Goodwin Sands.

It was hard to believe that this production of Michael Betteridge's Voices of the Sands, as part of Tête-à-Tête at London's charming Cockpit Theatre, was originally conceived as a cycle of ten related songs, as it seemed immediately suited for the stage. The three singers, Sarah Parkin, Donna Lennard, Suzie Purkiss, intelligently and wittily directed by Lucy Bradley (in a dual role as theatre technician), confidently used space, gesture and carefully selected props to draw the enthusiastic audience deep into the mysterious stories of the Goodwin Sands. 

Michael Betteridge: Voices of the Sands - Tête-à-Tête: the Opera Festival (Photo Claire Shovelton)

Writer Rebecca Hurst has created a fascinating and multi-layered libretto, interleaving her original work with found texts, fragments of sea shanties, shipping reports, folk tales and the wordless syllables of a seal-calling song. Her text combines the stories of lost ships, sunken fortunes, drowned sailors and lonely seagulls, described with a kind of romantic watercolour impressionism laid over newspaper matter-of-factness.

Luciana Perc's 'Film Performance', a musical response to Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton's 'Film;

 

Film is a 1965 short film that was a collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton. Argentinian composer Luciana Perc has created a musical response to this with her new piece, Film Performance. 

The work uses microphones and cameras on stage to create electroacoustic sounds and a film projection in real time. Everyday objects featured in Film are brought to the stage and turned into sound-making devices, with a series of solos, each focused on a specific combination of objects, from a newspaper and a hat to a fish tank and a bird cage, combining the sounds produced with these objects with vocal, instrumental and electroacoustic sounds.

Film Performance will be premiered as part of Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival 2022, on 3 September 2022 at the Cockpit, London NW8 8EH with music and sound design by Luciana Perc, performances by Lindsey Eastham, Anna Marmion, Thomas Niesser, Garreth Romain, Miranda Ostler, Anna Pych and Camille Maalawy, costume design by Eugenia Fiusco, set design by Amara Cooke and real-time video design by Enrico Dorigatti.

Full details from the festival website.

Refugees, teenage opera and the Marquis de Sade, Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival is back challenging boundaries with a cornucopia of new work at The Cockpit and beyond

Image Jeremy Richardson

Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival returns in 2022 as fit and lively as ever. Taking as its theme, burgeoning with life, this years festival runs from 15 August to 11 September with some two dozen or so events taking place at the Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone. The pieces on offer vary from an opera written by a 13-year-old to regular visitors to the festival returning with new events.

As well as the Cockpit programme there a few pieces elsewhere. There is a site-specific piece, Daniel Blanco Albert and Roxanne Korda's Besse: Water, Rye and Hops about medieval women brewing beer which takes place in the Ansbach and Hobday Brewery, and the brewery has even produced a new beer specially! As part of Kings Cross Sounds, We Are The Monsters is a new Celtic fusion project brought to you by members of Monster Ceilidh Band, Kathryn Tickell & The Darkening and The Shee which sees traditional roots and electronic influences come together in innovative new ways. Whilst What the dog said to the harvest at Kings Place is composer Jasmine Kent Rodgman and poet+writer Lisa Luxx's new collaboration, hybrid performance-installation drawing on opera, dance, spoken word, binaural sound and archive + documentary film

Robert Ely's 1936: Fishing is being presented by Homo Promos, Britain’s oldest LGBT company. The opera tells the story of the friendship between an old man and a teenager on Brighton Pier, where Oscar Wilde’s downfall still casts a long shadow forty years later. A poignant exploration of LGBT history, and the experiences passed down the generations, for better or worse. A kind of Death in Venice, told from the point of view of the boy Tadzio.

Toadette, the Frog Opera was composed by Jack Dauner when he was just 13 to a libretto by his Mum. Blending fantasy with romantic-style music, spectacular costumes, and unforgettable characters, it is a sure family favourite.  Darren Berry's comic opera about the Marquis de Sade's libido, The Crocodile of Old Kang Pow, is back having first appeared in reduced form at the 2020 festival. Edward Lambert's Music Troupe also makes a welcome return, this time with The Burning Question, a comedy about a female pope trying to get into heaven.

Michael Betteridge's Voices of the Sands is a dramatic cantata conjuring the stories of those who foundered on Goodwin Sands, perilous sandbar that lies six miles of the Kent coast. Steve Pfleegor Potter and Zoe Bouras' Landed tells the story of a Greek family fleeing the Suez Crisis to find their new home in England is falling off a cliff. Jeremy Gill and Marianna Suri's The Journey is inspired by the ongoing refugee crisis and adapts a story by Michael Zand in a performance featuring the refugee choir Citizens of the World Choir, to tell the of a Man who decides to escape the confines of his existence to travel in search of a better life.

Amir Mahyar Tafreshipour and Dominic Power's The Red Room is based on a short story by the Iranian modernist master, Sadegh Hedayat. Set in a provincial Persian town in the 1930s, it is an intimate drama with overtones of Gothic horror that explores nihilism and philosophic despair. Icelandic composer Helgi R. Ingvarsson's Music and the Brain is inspired by the writings of Oliver Sacks, which tells the story of The Singer, whose successful career has been cut short by an accident.    

Full details from the festival's website.

As we look forward to the 15th edition of Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival the company widens its remit with events at Royal College of Music, in Cornwall & North Shields

This Summer sees the 15th edition of Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival, running from 15 August to 11 September 2022 across London and online. Recent festivals have featured operas involving trampolines, libido-saving crocodiles, queer feminist gardening societies and much more besides and we can't wait for this new edition.

But the company is also widening its remit, creating events and supporting artists throughout the year and across the country. In May, the company is joining forces again with the Royal College of Music (RCM) to present Odysseys, six mini-operas created by RCM composers and performed by RCM students. Each opera features an unexpected protagonist embarking on a journey of self-acceptance - from the metamorphosis of a butterfly to a zombie. The performances take place in the RCM's Britten Theatre, 14 & 15 May 2022, further details from the RCM website.

Then in June, Bill Bankes-Jones is directing a production of The Firework-Maker's Daughter, David Bruce's 2013 opera based on the book by Philip Pullmann. The opera was premiered by the Opera Group and this new production debuts outdoors at the Minack Theatre in Cornwall on 21 June 2022 before travelling to Prideaux Place in July.

Then, in July, the company will stage HOME, a new community opera led by the company's music Director Timothy Burke, which explores what 'home' means to the people of North Shields. Performances take place at The Parks Sports Centre, North Shields in North Tyneside on 16 July 2022.

Further details from the company's website.

Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival - highlights from this years festival broadcast on-line

Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival might have finished its live performances for this year's festival, but the jollity is not over as on Friday 17 September 2021 the festival is broadcasting films of three of the highlights from this year's festival. 

Things begin with The Venus Bushfires, a watch party with the creative collective which has multidisciplinary artist Helen Epega at its centre. Then comes Alastair White's latest fashion-opera, RUNE. This is the third in a sequence of works which White has been producing [see my interview with him], and RUNE features performances from Patricia Auchterlonie and Simone Ibbett-Brown, an ensemble of three grand pianos, contemporary dance with interactive sculpture, and high fashion by Ka Wa Key. Finally, the evening concludes with The Castle of Crossed Destinies with words by Giovanni Privitera and music by Matteo Fania, an adaption of Calvino's novel that shows us knights in Times Square, legendary alchemists, and invisible kings, and in an event that combines animation with live performance.

Further details from the Tête à Tête website.

Unearthing the future - Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival for 2021

Last Summer, Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival was one of the few organisations who managed to put together a season of live, indoor events with audiences with their 2020 festival at The Cockpit. For 2021, the festival is returning to The Cockpit as well as having events at the Cubitt Sessions in Kings Cross, with an excursion to the Round Chapel in Hackney, with many of the shows having an online version as well.

The live events at this year's Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival run from 27 July to 17 August, and the festival takes as its theme Unearthing the future. Some works such as Darren Berry's comic operetta The Crocodile King of Old Kang Pow, and Edwin Roxburgh's Her War, represent complete visions for works partially revealed last year, whilst Alastair White's RUNE represents the culmination in a fashion-opera trilogy which has been unfolding over the last few years with ROBE [see my review] and WEAR. Following on from last year's We Sing/I Sang [see my review], Leo Doulton returns with another improvised work, Come Bargain With Uncanny Things.

Inspirations behind this year's operas include the love poems of Roman poet Sextus Propertius, one of the great classical novels of Chinese literature, and a novel by Italo Calvino. Marco Galvani's Helena [see my review of Invisible Cities, Sansara's recent disc of Galvani's choral music] takes Karel Čapek's 1920 science-fiction play RUR as its starting point. Our attitudes to our bodies and our sexualities form a number of key themes, so strong LGBTQ+ representation features in Warboy & Stewart's Shut Down The Club, an operatic techno rave looking at clubbing after covid, whilst Alice d'Lumiere's Until the Trans Lady Sings, is a piece about an aspiring singer wrestling with gender and vocal identities, and Her Body from Seawolf (Susannah Self) is a feminist, body positive piece exploring our relationship to mind, body and spirit.

Full details from the festival website.

Quite how they did it: Tête à Tête's Lessons From Live Opera In 2020: The Movie

Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival at Cockpit Theatre in 2020, with a real live audience (Photo Claire Shovelton)

During 2020, Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival was one of the first companies to mount an in-door performance again, and between July and September 2020 the company even managed to present a complete festival of new opera, mixing live audience with those viewing via the internet.

Now the company has created a video and other assets which explore what has been learned from the experience. Under the title Lessons From Live Opera In 2020: The Movie there is plenty of informative material all presented with the company's light touch. With the situation regarding live performance still not entirely settled, there is plenty of useful stuff here for smaller opera companies, but frankly from an opera consumer's point of view it makes fascinating reading too, illuminating quite how they did it.

And the video boils the process down to a series of top tips

Lesson 1: Keep your planning flexible
Lesson 2: Prototype
Lesson 3: Have a clear aim
Lesson 4: Develop a strong network
Lesson 5: Keep Communicating all the way
Lesson 6: Hold your production lightly
Lesson 7: Carefully consider and rehearse the flow of people
Lesson 8: Work with your artists to keep Covid compliant
Lesson 9 Slow down in the theatre

You can learn more from the video and other assets information from the company's website.

Looking back, looking forward: after an extraordinary year, Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival presents a final opera, and two talks centred on the 2020 festival

This year's Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival was a triumph of will and creativity over circumstance. During July, the festival presented 19 live shows at the Cockpit Theatre, allowing over 100 opera makers back into the theatre, and everything was streamed on-line as well. But the festival is not quite over for 2020, and it has three further events to intrigue us. Two events are talks, which look back on the 2020 festival, seeing what was done and what we can learn, whilst there is one final on-line opera.

On 25 November, there is an Opera and Music Theatre Forum (OMTF) Team Talk with the Tête à Tête team, and artistic director Bill Bankes-Jones, who put together the 2020 festival, sharing insights into programming and platforms, buildings and box office, marketing and monetising, and of course Health & Safety in this most strange of years. Further details from the festival website.

On 27 November, the music theatre group Aukoko will be hosting the first of its Powder Room Talks in which will chat to a group of women creatives from this year's festival to explore innovation and the creative process in times of Covid-19, and the future of women opera-makers, featuring contributions from April Koyejo-Audiger, Georgia Barnes, Anna Ho, Simone Ibbet-Brown and Julia Mintzer. Further details from the festival website.

Also, on 27 November, there will be one last Tête à Tête opera for 2020. LUQ society with perform Elena by Angela Luque and Isabel Grábalos. Described as a surrealist take on the true story of a family marked by adversity, the work looks at three women, three generations with a common past that persists in the form of transgenerational trauma. Further information from the festival website.

Of clocks, time and the hive mind: Martin Bussey's 'Timeless Figure' and 'We Sing/I Sang' at Tête à Tête

We Sing/I Sang - Hannah Gardiner, Leo Doulton, CN Lester - Tête à Tête 2020
(Photo Claire Shovelton)

We Sing/I Sang, Martin Bussey Timeless Figure; Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival at the Cockpit
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 15 September 2020
A meditation on time, based around 17th century Shropshire clock-maker, and an improvised opera which attempted to assess the reactions of the audience's Hive Mind

Martin Bussey: Timeless Figure
Peter Edge - Tête à Tête 2020
(Photo Claire Shovelton)

On Tuesday 15 September 2020, we returned to The Cockpit for two further live opera premieres from Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival. Timeless Figure by Martin Bussey, performed by Peter Edge, baritone, Daniel Mawson, clarinet, Joe Lenehan, viola, and Darren Gallacher, marimba, conducted by Martin Bussey with images by Laurel Turton, plus We Sing/I Sang, an improvised opera devised by Leo Doulton with CN Lester, voice, and Hannah Gardiner, viola, musical director Erika Gundesen.

Martin Bussey was the composer of Mary's Hand about Queen Mary I, which was performed at the 2018 festival [see my review]. His new opera also takes an historical figure, the clockmaker JB Joyce (Peter Edge) who founded the eponymous firm of clockmakers (still in existence) in 1680. During the 19th and early 20th centuries the company was responsible for installing many of the display clocks around the world. Bussey, who wrote his own text, used the historical figure of Joyce and the connection to clocks around the work, to create a meditation on clocks and time across the ages.

The result was something of a 45-minute tour de force for baritone Peter Edge, whose engaging performance very much carried the piece. Edge managed to bring personality to what was less of a narrative and more of a thoughtful and complex philosophical consideration. He was finely supported by the musicians, and Bussey's writing structured the work in sections so that we got to appreciate his imaginative writing for marimba, clarinet and viola, with the composer using the instruments singly or severally to create some striking textures. In style the music was fundamentally tonal, but complex with Edge's vocal line being expressive and singer-friendly yet highly wrought.

Accompanying the music was a series of images by Laurel Turton, these formed their own meditation on clocks and time, with a focus very much on clocks installed by JB Joyce and company. Unfortunately, these images were perhaps a bit too absorbing and sometimes took attention from the performance, particularly when there was a disjoint in subject. Turton seemed to have a particular fascinating for historic locations in Chicago, which was a city which did not seem to crop up in Bussey's text, leading you to wonder why.

A one-man Paradise Lost and an uproarious contemporary operetta: Tête à Tête brings live opera back to the Cockpit

Geoff Page: Paradise Lost - Lawrence Zazzo - Tête à Tête 2020
(Photo Claire Shovelton)

Geoff Page Paradise Lost, Darren Berry The Crocodile of old Kang Pow; Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival at Cockpit
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 12 September 2020
Live opera indoors with an audience: a striking double bill of Milton's Lucifer and an uproarious Marquis de Sade

This year's Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival took on an entirely new level of experiment and innovation. In addition to a programme of new and experimental opera, the company is pioneering live, indoor performance post-lockdown. So, along with around 20 other people we went along to the Cockpit Theatre on Saturday 12 September 2020, for two operas. Geoff Page's Paradise Lost (based on Milton), performed by Lawrence Zazzo (counter-tenor) and Geoff Page (piano), and act one of Darren Berry's The Crocodile of Old Kang Pow, with Caroline Kennedy and Phil Wilcox, directed by Christian Holder.

In order to be socially distanced, the sheer act of theatre going has changed considerably, audience numbers are far fewer and the process of getting in and out is far more logistically complex. But also, as artistic director of the festival, Bill Bankes Jones explained in his introduction, most of the productions in the festival have also had to be modified to follow the new rules. But the end result was that we were once again able to enjoy live performance.

We will not make art in isolation: Tête à Tête - a manifesto and a festival for 2020

For over 20 years each Summer, Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival has been bringing people together to create new opera. From the very beginning, the festival has been about much more than performance. It brings creative artists and performers together to talk about opera, imagine it, create it and experiment with ideas about what opera is exactly, with the festival being as much about the creative act, with operas in various states from tentative beginnings to the fully formed. This year will be no different, despite lockdown.

Tête à Tête and artistic director Bill Bankes-Jones have produced a Manifesto for a real opera festival in an imaginary world. Essentially it is a document supporting the idea of the creation of opera in whatever the circumstances, 'We are artists who create opera', 'We can do anything', 'We work together, and together with our audiences. We will not make art in isolation', 'This can be a real space, or a space in our imaginations'.

So the 2020 festival will be about the creation of opera, whether in a real space or a space of imagination. Bankes-Jones and the team are working towards a real festival, in a real place (The Cockpit Theatre) later this year, but situations and circumstances change. And the fundamental idea about Tête à Tête is that artists come together, in whatever the space.

So Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival 2020 will indeed be going ahead - whether by the act of imagination, or in an eventual real physical space. Both online and offline, artists and companies involved in the festival will share the creative work behind their imaginary operas, from the draft libretti to the visual references that inspire them.

Further information from their website.