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?
The Barber was literally staged on the lawn. And if it rains? ‘We hope it won’t. Would you like a poncho?’
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.
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