Donizetti Rita /Tchaikovsky Iolanta Guildhall School, June 2011 Director Martin Lloyd-Evans Lighting Colin Grenfell

Reviews 

This was an evening which started well and just kept on getting better... The white-tiled set for the greasy spoon café (Rita) was perfect... I initially wondered why the opera (Iolanta) was set in a giant, disused swimming pool, essentially using the same set from the white-tiled café from Rita, but what Lloyd-Evans has very cleverly done is to focus on the way René cocoons his daughter from all mention of vision and light, keeping her in an artificial environment. Yannis Thavoris, the designer, has a ladder down to the pool which is removable, so René is effectively trapping his daughter down there, where she is tended by nurses who play gramophone records (Iolanta thinking they’re real musicians and thanking them), move pots of roses around for her to pick and lay Astroturf strips for her to walk on. (Opera Brittania)

Rita turns out to be far more entertaining than the plot outline promises and deserves to be more widely seen. Set by Yannis Thavoris in a 1960’s café, this production promised well from the start. ... The set in this production (Iolanta) was a bizarre mix of a disused swimming pool with the root of a tree poking through and the feel of a mental asylum with white-uniformed nurses standing guard inside a wire fence. The set worked in that it posed questions (Was she metaphorically “under water” in her blindness or underground with the tree root?) and suggested an altered reality which fitted with the strange story. (bachtrack)