Britain’s youngest summer opera festival is seriously impressive

Waterperry is one of the UK’s youngest summer opera festivals: it started up in 2018, at the northern limit of the species’ natural habitat. You leave the motorway at Oxford services and double back through the fields to the hamlet of Waterperry. Drive past the ‘Cats Crossing’ sign and the life-sized effigy of Rowan Atkinson (honestly) and you’re there. There’s a big house (slightly run to seed), a farm shop, a garden centre and a nursery containing the national saxifrage collection, which is not something you see every day. The opera festival squeezes in between them. Let’s do the show right here! Well, why not?

In other words, it exudes charm, with a strikingly young and enthusiastic artistic team plus a pizza van, which after a summer of rip-off picnics and lukewarm fizz comes as cheese-topped manna. So far, so quirky, though as you file through the discount plant pots you do wonder if the opera will be just as ad hoc. In a word, no – not even slightly. This is a seriously impressive artistic operation. Neither of this year’s two productions would have disgraced a national touring company, and one of them was excellent by any standard.

The Barber of Seville was directed by John Wilkie, and staged on the lawn. Literally on the lawn: the orchestra is covered, but everyone else is at the mercy of the pigeons. And if it rains? ‘We hope it won’t,’ said the steward. ‘Would you like a poncho?’ Anyway, it didn’t. The orchestra was scaled down and amplified; probably unavoidably, though the ears soon adjusted. Let’s not forget – or forgive – that within recent memory at least two infinitely better-resourced festivals presented operas with a pre-recorded orchestra.