Garsington Opera has just opened an astonishingly beautiful, light and spacious set of rehearsal studios, nestling in the lush Buckinghamshire countryside on the expansive Wormsley estate, the result of a £14m appeal. The building deserves to win architectural awards for its sympathetic use of brick, flint, timber and tile, and it should attract other creatives to use its cavernous studios, particularly television production companies.
Its completion appears to have injected a new confidence into the company, judging by this year’s rollicking season opener, Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Platée, Garsington’s first venture into French baroque. And it is to television that director Louisa Muller turns in her new production, the vacuous nature of reality TV in particular, lifting this 18th-century tale of Greek gods and mortals straight into the here and now with startling, breathless ingenuity.
