Sallinen The King Goes Forth to France Guildhall School, March 2009 Director Martin Lloyd-Evans Lighting Giuseppe di Iorio

Reviews 

The work’s fantasy also provides fodder for an inventive production team. This staging is clever and varied and flows seamlessly, successfully merging the serious and the surreal, and transition passages such as the Prince/King marching across the ice-floes linking England to France are deftly handled. There were some entertaining touches and reminders of more-modern culture-icons that have become “part of England” (including a Patsy look-a-like from “Absolutely Fabulous”) coupled with settings managed to evoke a sense of time and place and yet to undermine such security. (ClassicalSource.com)

Superbly designed and lit by Yannis Thavoris and Giuseppe di Iorio, Martin Lloyd-Evans's incisive Guildhall School of Music and Drama production deftly balances comedy and tragedy. (Independent on Sunday)

Lloyd-Evans's staging, imaginatively designed by Yannis Thavoris, is unfailingly crisp and clever. (Guardian)

Martin Lloyd-Evans’s staging combines simplicity and wit. Yannis Thavoris’s designs take us on a journey back in time, as the totems of English democracy – a presentation-box throne, a bowler-hatted prime minister – are exchanged for the chill realities of authoritarianism. (Financial Times)

... Martin Lloyd-Evans's production at the Guildhall School, in Yannis Thavoris's suitably surreal sets, is... entertaining. (Times)