What do you get if you combine a soprano shimmying to a baroque orchestra, an aristocratic household with a pug fixation, and gags about Arts Council funding and the local water? The answer is 48 hours in Buxton. After the cancelled season in 2020 and last year’s masked-up affair, the opera festival is back in full Technicolor: unapologetically ambitious and fizzing with energy. In fact, if these young casts had fizzed any more vigorously, they might have dissolved entirely.
Johann Hasse’s Antonio e Cleopatra cannot claim to be the best-known version of the story. Buxton’s production, directed by Evangeline Cullingworth, transforms the no-frills stage of the Pavilion Arts Centre into a cheap hotel room (bed, chair, fire escape) where the protagonists take refuge after Antony’s military defeat. It’s an ideal setting: grimly oppressive as Cleopatra enters with “Egyptian” wig in hand and suitcase in tow, and all the more claustrophobic as the couple recall happier times and dream of global domination.
