Letters of a Love Betrayed
Linbury Studio
Carmen
Royal Opera House
Wozzeck
Royal Festival Hall
A hectic operatic week, three down and two (to be reviewed next week) to go, began lamentably with what I’m in danger of coming to think of as the archetypical Linbury experience. That hideous place, a kind of operatic Nibelheim under the Valhalla of the Royal Opera, has seats so cramped and uncomfortable that I can only think that their point is to ensure one stays awake, as one witnesses another première which seems destined to be also a dernière. Eleanor Alberga’s Letters of a Love Betrayed, with libretto by Donald Sturrock from the story by Isabel Allende, received in many, though not all, ways a better performance than it deserved from Music Theatre Wales, with Mary Plazas, a superb and committed artist, giving yet another portrayal of pain turning to agony, with arbitrarily contrived final happiness, unusual for her, at the end.
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