'The Magic Flute' - Tobacco Factory Theatre

For what it's worth. Prince Tamino and his Sancho Panza-esque companion, the bird-catcher Papageno, get to meet the 'Queen of the Night' who bids the Prince to rescue her abducted daughter Pamina. The daughter is being held by the High Priest Sarastro and his acolytes at the temple of Isis and Osiris.

Our two heroes duly arrive at the temple where they are subjected to three trials (which mostly seem to involve being quiet when people talk to you). After success, Prince Tamino wins the hand of Princess Pamino, and Papageno gets a raucous chick of his own buffoonish persuasion.

It turns out the High Priest Sarastro is the good guy, and the Queen was vengeful and spiteful.

You don't go to opera to enjoy the intricacies of the sophisticated plot.

'The Magic Flute' stage 15 minutes before the start

I kept being distracted by the way performers seemed to be someone else. The bird-catcher clown looked (and behaved) very much liked UKIP leader Nigel Farage on steroids; the director of music was a double for TV cook Nigel Slater (or possibly Louis Theroux); Princess Pamina seemed the reincarnation of Clare's niece Jane; the High Priest Sarastro look like Brian Blessed operating at 30% capacity. I thought the Prince was adequate while extravert-birder Papageno stole the show.

The orchestra warms up

Still, a fine, professional performance and the music of Mozart. The visceral reality of real people doing stuff a few feet away gets to beat hyper-engineered imagery any day, no matter how good film-making gets these days.

Tosca at The Tobacco Factory

Opera at The Tobacco Factory in Bedminster, Bristol last night. Here's the description from the website:

Following their fresh and wildly successful production of La Bohème here in July 2012, Olivier award-winning OperaUpClose returns to the Factory Theatre with another Puccini masterpiece – Tosca.

In a new English version by Adam Spreadbury-Maher, with a new orchestration by Danyal Dhondy and design by Nina Fransson, we are transported to 1989 East Germany. Tosca is sensual, powerful and vulnerable. Living in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, she is the toast of the GDR elite, until her lover Cavaradossi helps a political prisoner to escape, putting Tosca at the mercy of Stasi chief Scarpia.

Puccini’s tautest drama is given a radical yet affectionate re-working, set in the dying days of the East German regime and stripping the story to its most essential elements. A cast of just five singers and a trio of piano, clarinet and cello brings OperaUpClose’s trademark intimacy and immediacy to this tale of love, lust and the corrupting influence of power while retaining all of the emotional impact of the original.

Floria Tosca - star of the show

The setting at the Tobacco Factory is small and intimate and the theatre was packed. It's utterly astonishing how much power the operatic voice can generate:  like being in a hangar with a 747, engines at full throttle. More melodious, obviously.

"Richard III" at the Tobacco Factory Theatre

Southville, in Bedminster, Bristol is old Victorian inner-city - now populated by Guardian-reading fifty-somethings with fashionably-long silver hair, leather-jackets and purposeful walking. Also detox shops, the odd ex-hippy and a non-oppressive sense of high-street community. Buy now while it's still affordable.

Don't know how much this gentle gentrification is down to the Tobacco Factory project but we ate at their student-union-style cafe (mezzas since you ask) and watched their extraordinary-accomplished "Richard III" this afternoon. Here's a picture of the small, intimate theatre just before the play started.

The Tobacco Factory theatre

"Richard III" is one of Shakespeare's earliest (and longest) plays, a fast-moving thriller with a notable villain in the eponymous ruler- who shares his murderous plans in multiple asides to the audience. The cast were uniformly excellent and the archaic language was hardly noticeable. It helped to have studied the Wikipedia articles on the historic king and the play beforehand - the family and royal connections are intricate.

So we really enjoyed it and plan to visit again soon for their next production.