Pulitzer-prize winning opera in UK premiere

Samuel Barber’s Pulitzer-prize winning opera Vanessa, first seen at New York’s Met forty years ago, is to finally receive its British premiere in a production at Hammersmith’s Lyric Studio, staged by the Other Theatre Company. The opera, with its libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti inspired by Barber’s favourite play, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, concerns a woman, Vanessa, who awaits the arrival of her former lover in her isolated European country house in the winter of 1905. But when he arrives, he is not the man she expected.

The Other Theatre Company last staged a critically acclaimed production of Benjamin Britten’s Rape of Lucretia at Battersea Arts Centre.

Vanessa will run from January 8 to 23, 1999.

For further details on the Other Theatre Company, contact 011-44-171-386 5033; for bookings, contact the Lyric box office on 011-44-181-741 2311.

By Mark Shenton