FEB 2026 

Mozart’s comic masterpiece, directed and designed by Paula Chitty.
Sung in English with the SACO Orchestra and Chorus conducted by David Ireson.

CAST

Elizabeth Berry-Roe
Tom Stevenson
Noah Golding
Arina Mkrtchian
Charles Naylor
Adrienne (Ptole)  Walters
Jonathan Jolly
Deborah Holborn
Olivia Thomas
Andrew Currall

CHORUS 

Diane Breckon
Maddie McGuire
Rosemary Courtney
Karen Thorp
Jo Pearce-Westrop
Susan Akroyd
Joe Curtis
Richard Winski
Andrew Currall
Jonathan Tully
Richard Bull
James Ship

Figaro and Susanna are ready to marry – but one exhausting, chaotic day throws everything into question. Their plans are disrupted by their boss, who’s secretly pursuing Susanna, and by an unexpected rival with a contract and a grudge.

As secrets fly and disguises pile up, alliances shift and a lovestruck teenager keeps showing up where he shouldn’t. What begins as a simple wedding spirals into deception, mistaken identity, and surprise revelations. Through clever plotting and bold moves, love pushes back against power – proving that even in the middle of madness, one day can change everything.

Mozart’s comic masterpiece, directed and designed by Paula Chitty, is sung in English with the SACO Orchestra and Chorus conducted by David Ireson.

Directors note. 

Although separated by centuries, Pop Art and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro share a surprisingly similar artistic spirit. In this reimagining, I relocate the opera to a 1960s British hotel at the height of the Pop Art movement, with Cherubino swept toward the rising tensions of the Cold War. This setting allows the opera’s radical energy to resonate with a period equally defined by social change, satire, and challenges to authority.

Both Pop Art and The Marriage of Figaro fundamentally question power structures. Pop Art mocks elite culture and traditional artistic hierarchies, while Figaro famously places servants at the centre of the drama, allowing them to outwit their masters. At the heart of Pop Art lies a fascination with flattening hierarchies: the movement broke down boundaries between high art and mass culture, celebrity and ordinariness, luxury and the everyday. A Warhol soup can could hold the same aesthetic status as a Renaissance portrait. Artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein drew on comic strips, advertisements, and consumer products. Imagery traditionally dismissed as low or commercial, using irony, wit, and repetition to blur distinctions between high and low culture.

Setting Figaro in a British hotel of the Pop Art era makes these parallels tangible. The Count becomes a hotel manager clinging to fading authority, while the servants re-emerge as maids, porters, and gardeners navigating a world in which social divisions are increasingly unstable. This mirrors the opera’s original revolutionary spirit, where authority is mocked, and servants become the true heroes of the narrative.

Both Pop Art and The Marriage of Figaro also challenge traditional representations of women by placing them at the centre of the work and questioning male dominance. In Figaro, Susanna and Rosina are intelligent, emotionally complex figures who drive the plot and ultimately outmanoeuvre Almaviva, exposing the imbalance of power between men and women. This marked a departure from earlier operatic traditions that often-rendered women passive or idealised. Similarly, Pop Art exaggerated female imagery through bold colours and stylised forms drawn from advertising and comic strips, drawing attention to stereotypes imposed by mass media. By amplifying these ideals, Pop Art revealed their artificial and restrictive nature.

I hope you enjoy this colourful reworking of a comic opera that unfolds over one chaotic day, thriving on impulsive action and rapid misunderstandings. Like Pop Art, it possesses an immediacy rooted in the present moment, capturing contemporary political tensions with emotional intensity and humour. Above all, it delights in poking fun at unjust power structures and celebrates the ability of ordinary people to shape their own destinies.