It’s a controversial interpretation... as designed by the talented Yannis Thavoris, it looks like the work of a first division opera company... Thavoris’s sets are both beautiful and symbolically resonant... the clock doubling as a plughole... strikes me as an ingenious metaphor for the inexorable march of time... (Sunday Times)
... ce spectacle à la fois professionnel et plein d’imagination... (Opera International magazine)
... the most creative and beautiful staging in years, full of insights and surprises... With her designer Yannis Thavoris, Arden has sacrificed the usual Hogarthian trappings in favour of something darker and more modern... the subtexts come crawling out apace and in plenty... The surprises are half the fun... none of them is gratuitous; they all have telling points to make, sometimes revelatory. (Financial Times)
The really exciting thing about this exciting evening is that it doesn’t signal its excitement. It creeps up on you so that the gasp catches in your throat. Nothing is quite what it seems. Our expectations are repeatedly confounded. In that respect we are all of us placed in Tom Rakewell’s shoes... A theatre of delusion. Yannis Thavoris’s designs comply. The giant plughole is also a clock, the plug a slivery moon; the Belisha beacon is topped with a chandelier; Tom’s bread-making machine is a cash point; and in among the madding crowds of London and/or the clients of Mother Goose’s brothel, you’ll glimpse familiar figures from our composers adopted home: a New York cop, a Hollywood starlet, a Broadway vamp. Welcome to the madhouse, where the inmates wear the pages of a calendar as an ugly reminder that their number, like Tom’s, is up. (Independent)
