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? The Barber was literally staged
