Paul Wingfield conductor
Rebecca Meltzer director

Scandalous, sparkling and downright silly! Experience the topsy-turvy world of Offenbach’s enduring masterpiece (featuring the popular ‘Can-Can’) as ill-fitting couple Orpheus and Euridice traverse heaven and hell in the company of gods with very earthly desires. High japes and high kicks...a romp of an evening awaits.

Sung in French with English dialogue.

Welsh National Opera

Tomáš Hanus Conductor

Jack Furness Director

Rebecca Meltzer Movement Director

A ghostly ship roams the endless sea, vast, lonely and unrelenting. Its captain cursed to sail for eternity until redeemed by true love. 

Senta, captivated by the story of the mysterious Flying Dutchman condemned to sail forever, becomes the only hope for his salvation. Her longing for escape entwines her fate with his in ways neither could foresee.

This gripping reimagining of The Flying Dutchman explores the deep ache of loneliness and the fragile hope of human connection. Inspired by the sublime beauty of the Welsh coast, the sea is the opera’s canvas, and both a compulsion and prison for its characters. Wagner's orchestrations from the thunderous overture to its haunting arias, become the heartbeat of the story, evoking the power of the ocean and leaving you adrift in its spell.

Gerald Barry’s witty and highly original adaptation of this much-loved masterpiece will be conducted by Douglas Boyd and directed by Jack Furness, following his celebrated Garsington productions of The Queen of Spades and Rusalka. The visually striking, colourful and bombastic production features the return of Jennifer France, Henry Waddington and Seán Boylan, with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

If you have any preconceptions about an opera based on Oscar Wilde’s brilliant 1894 comedy of manners and misapprehensions, be prepared to abandon them. The composer Gerald Barry adores the play and has taken inspiration from Wilde’s statement “That we should treat all trivial things in life very seriously, and all serious things in life with a sincere and studied triviality”, turning the play inside out and upside down with reckless effrontery. As Barry has said, “The play’s bones are unshatterable. My version is an X-ray of it.” Any shattering that occurs during the course of the entertainment is more likely to be of plates than of dramatic structure.