Handel Ariodante Buxton Festival, July 2016 Director Harry Fehr Choreographer Kally Lloyd-Jones Lighting James Farncombe

Reviews 

Fresh and handsome to look at in Yannis Thavoris’s designs – modernist brushed steel and glass, effective use of a spiral staircase and potted orange trees, which bloom, die and are replanted – Harry Fehr’s staging of Handel’s Ariodante for Scottish Opera takes liberties but reaps rewards. (The Observer)

... Scottish Opera have hit the nail on the head... Fehr has updated the action to an unspecified modern setting, and Yannis Thavoris’s designs reflect that contemporary eclecticism. Inside the “palace” - more a utilitarian public building with its emergency exit sign leading out to the incessant snowfall - all is shiny metal and minimalist.

It’s a perfect scene-setter for the story of Ariodante which is about to unfold. (The Scotsman)

... Harry Fehr’s wonderfully smart, elegant production for Scottish Opera...

Fehr sets the story in the King’s stylish court and with its smartly uniformed maids and gardeners, well dressed royal advisors, colourful military uniforms and vintage frocks, there is a bygone era feel. Designer Yannis Thavoris’s splendid fixed set is of a formal atrium with a short spiral staircase and we look out through floor to ceiling windows onto snow covered mountains. A push-bar-to-open fire escape door roots us firmly in the present. Luxuriant orange bushes flourish in individual pots, with trendy heat lamps protecting them from the snow outside...

This is a successful production and one of which Scottish Opera can be justly proud... For a national company, this Ariodante deserves a wider exposure. (bachtrack)

... Harry Fehr’s direction and Yannis Thavoris’s design allow the action to flow as smoothly as the music... a thoroughly satisfying and thought-provoking piece of operatic entertainment. (All Edinburgh Theatre)

In the end, it’s all about the oranges. They adorn the programme that accompanies Harry Fehr’s intelligent new production of Handel’s Ariodante for Scottish Opera. More importantly, they’re prominent in designer Yannis Thavoris’s clinical steel-and-glass set, growing on carefully groomed bushes in six neat tubs, placed meticulously below warming light bulbs, protected from the gales and snow drifts outside by a wall of glass.

They're a simple but highly effective metaphor in Fehr’s deeply unsettling production, which relocates Handel’s opera – originally set in an unrecognisible, age-old Scotland – further north, in some wintry, puritanical, fundamentalist military state, full of bowing servants and pristine uniforms, and with the motto ‘Trust in the Lord’ etched immovably into the walls.

Those oranges look charming at first, tended and cherished by scuttling servants, but gradually serve to encapsulate the claustrophobic, artifical world that Fehr has created for the opera, one governed by its own rules that have more to do with dogma than with nature. In this sinister environment, Handel's Othello-like tale of deception, jealousy and revenge plays out almost as though among children, hothoused like those oranges in this strangely antiseptic but horribly fascinating environment, and knowing little except its rules.

Fehr’s production is brave, unafraid of unsubtle imagery (a brief opening scene with two hanging bodies twitching on a gallows tells us all we need to know about this society), and very strong, both visually and conceptually. (the arts desk)

... The costumes are unfussy, the sets clean and communicative... (seen and heard international)

... beautifully-costumed... looking fascinatingly anachronistic... (The Herald)