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A night at the opera: That Bastard Puccini! (Park Theatre)

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It’s hard to imagine that it’s only been 130 years since Puccini first premiered La Boheme. Nowadays, it’s a revered classic, and guaranteed to be on any opera company's annual programme if it needs to stay afloat. It’s a crowd pleaser with its melodrama of poor, impoverished artists loving, starving and dying in Paris. But Puccini’s La Boheme had a less auspicious beginning, with one of his contemporaries accusing him of stealing his idea and being poorly received on its first outing. And that’s at the heart of That Bastard Puccini! Currently playing at Park Theatre , writer James Inverne uses the friendship and rivalry between the two composers, Puccini and Ruggero Leoncavallo, to weave a comic tale of creative frustration with an awful lot of facts and tidbits about the opera scene at the time. It’s part comedy, part music appreciation.  It opens with Leoncavallo (Alasdair Buchan) at home with his wife Berthe (Lisa-Anne Wood), cursing about Puccini’s latest work, which is drawn ...

Wicked thoughts: The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd @OrangeTreeThtr

The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd at The Orange Tree Theatre is an exciting start to new season at the Orange Tree Theatre. The audience is made to feel as if they are eavesdropping on the drama in this working cottage where a family is falling apart.

Set in the Nottinghamshire mining community in 1914, DH Lawrence has created a moving piece of working class woman in an abusive relationship.

After an evening where he brings home two ladies after a night of drinking she wishes he was dead. She soon gets her wish and then suffers guilt.


It's evocative, if a bit laboured, particularly in the second half where the death, guilt and shame for wicked thoughts and being above one's station is the focus point of the story.

But it is also nicely acted, particularly with Ellie Piercy as the righteous Mrs Holyroyd.

Jordan Mifsud, as the slightly hunky electrician (a job above the position of her husband) delivers a subtle performance as a man who tries to convince her to leave with him.

Perhaps a prelude to the upheavals of the twentieth century and further rights for women, it is a fascinating portrait of a community and way of life that has been lost to time and industrial development.

It runs at Richmond through to 4 October.

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