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High anxiety: Collapse - Riverside Studios

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It’s a brave or maybe slightly provocative production to use Hammersmith Bridge on their artwork for a show called Collapse, which is about how everything collapses—poorly maintained bridges, relationships, and jobs. Nothing works. That’s probably too close to home for Hammersmith residents stuck with a magnificently listed and useless bridge on their front door. It gets even weirder when you realise the piece is staged in what looks like a meeting room with a bar. However, keeping things together in the most unlikely of circumstances is at the heart of Allison Moore's witty and engaging four-hander, which is currently having a limited engagement at Riverside Studios . The piece opens with Hannah (Emma Haines) about to get an injection from her husband (Keenan Heinzelmann). They’re struggling for a baby, and he’s struggling to get out of bed. But he managed to give her a shot of hormones before she started worrying about the rest of the day. She’s unsure she will keep her job with ...

Opera: La Sonnambula


 Opening night of La Sonnambula at the Royal Opera was an opportunity for Eglise Gutiérrez to show off some incredibly light yet lingering high notes in this piece about jealousy, mistaken identity... And sleepwalking. It is a mildly silly opera but the piece by Bellini with its music and creative forces at work make you overlook these things and the let the action unfold in what looks like a large railway station foyer.

The cast are great and rising star tenor Celso Albelo makes his Royal Opera debut as the jealous composer Elvino. But the real passion and drama was perhaps watching Gutiérrez and conductor Daniel Oren create music together. It was exhausting yet exhilarating and what any good night at the opera surely is about. Nothing too serious but lovely music set to a mildly amusing farce, complete with a domineering mother. It runs through to November 18.

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