OperaUpClose

Olivier award-winning OperaUpClose comes to the Arcola for the first time with a new English version of Tchaikovsky’s sweeping opera, Eugene Onegin.

A coming-of-age story, a requiem for lost innocence and a triumphant celebration of hard-won independence, it is told through some of the most glorious vocal music ever written.

This new chamber version transposes the story of Tatyana’s sexual awakening to the early 1960s, a world on the cusp of the women’s liberation movement when new thinking stood up to the old ways.

Infatuation and self-restraint do battle in a well-tailored world of sleek suits and full skirts, with seasonal allusions to the snow-swept Russian landscape of Alexander Pushkin’s original novel.