The picnic hamper’s open, the bubbly is chilled, and country house opera is starting to eat itself. When you arrive at the Wormsley Estate you enter a fantastic, baffling world. Figures in black tie stroll between topiary hedges in obedience to unstated rules, while serving staff hover a few paces behind, gliding silently in to reassert neatness and order. Children dressed in red (they’re from a local Scout group) pop up to help and guide. Then the new production of Die Zauberflöte begins and with a deft, surreal spin, the director Netia Jones bowls it all straight back at you.
That’s a big part of the fun here. Jones has designed the production herself, and she clearly has quite a DVD collection. Act One resembles The Draughtsman’s Contract, complete with box hedges and symbolic geometrical forms, though surveillance cameras cluster, dove-like, on a Georgian façade. Act Two is set in the Red Room from Twin Peaks, with a few quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale.
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