Reviews:
THE TIMES, july 15, 2008
Neil Fisher ****
...their delicious tragicomedy, which has come up a treat in Iford Manor’s beautiful mock-Renaissance cloisters. With a maximum of a ninety in the audience at this most intimate of the country-house opera festivals, the Early Opera Company’s production might not have to strive for spectacle, but it does have to draw us into a convincing world of its own – and, by and large, it succeeds handsomely.
...As we enter, members of the audience are given cheerful stickers advertising the “sex resort” of Colchis; within minutes of curtain up Stephen Wallace’s Jason and Madeleine Shaw’s Medea are giggling under the sheets – the feckless squaddie has moved on to the next port and the next floozy, abandoning wife number one, Sinead Campbell’s desperate Hypsipile, in the process.
...the modern-dress setting ramps up the naughtiness, Constantine never resorts to caricature: these are very real people in a very real pickle.
...It may be more than 350 years old, but Giasone still feels terrifically alive.
The Independent, 20 July 2008
Classical review by Anna Picard
Cavalli is back in fashion again – and on the basis of one stirringly staged, pocket-sized production amid terraces and wisteria vines, he deserves his new fame.
...it's a place for six-foot-tall lager-drinking rabbits, lustful squaddies, buxom blondes and tour guides welcoming us to Colchis, the "sun, sea and sex resort".
...close to Graham Vick's site-specific work with Birmingham Opera Company.
...Martin Constantine's production of Cavalli's Giasone for the Early Opera Company offered a sort of Big Brother intimacy, every bead of sweat and smudge of mascara magnified.
Musical Criticism, 17 July 2008
Hugo Shirley ****
...in Martin Constantine's sharply directed production, Cavalli's Giasone quickly knocks one out of any state of complacency a good picnic with views of the rolling Wiltshire countryside might have induced.
...Making the most of the small space at his disposal, Constantine and his designer Signe Beckmann set the first act not in Colchis the legendary home of the Golden Fleece, but Colchis the garishly branded sex resort. The act takes place in a room rented, one suspects, by the hour; it houses a mini-bar, television and a large bed with ghastly satin bed-clothes.
...Constantine cleverly reimagines it as some sort of trip, the chorus of spirits embodied by men with large rabbit heads reminiscent of Donnie Darko.
“...it's a place for six-foot-tall lager-drinking rabbits, lustful squaddies, buxom blondes and tour guides welcoming us to Colchis, the "sun, sea and sex resort".”
(The Independent)
