‘A HANDBAG?’: Seán Boylan (Algernon), Lady Bracknell (Henry Waddington), Holly Brown (Gwendolen), Zahid Siddiqui (Jack) on Francis O’Connor’s set Picture by Julian Guidera
Stage designers rarely get star billing - unless they are David Hockney, Salvador Dali or Oskar Kokoschka. But when a long-serving British scenographer unveils two terrific shows in the space of two weeks, we should stand up and cheer.
Francis O’Connor is one of our busiest theatre artists responsible for the look of opera and spoken drama. In the past three weeks his sets have graced two of the most different imaginable operas: Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia at Grange Park Opera in Surrey and Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest at Garsington Opera in Buckinghamshire.
Thanks to O’Connor’s designs, both operas come across as spectacular re-imaginings of classic texts. The Rossini has been an operatic fixture ever since its (astonishingly unsuccessful) premiere at Rome’s Teatro Argentina in 1815. Barry’s quirky modernist reinvention of a classic Oscar Wilde play is still relatively new: it was first performed in concert at Los Angeles in 2011 (conducted by Thomas Adès, no less) and staged in London a year later.