Wolf-Ferrari Le donne curiose Guildhall School, November 2015 Director Stephen Barlow Lighting Howard Hudson Video Dom Baker

Reviews 

the set alone is worth the ticket price. (classical-music.com)

The malleable set offers one remarkable coup, a swivel from club entrance to club proper, the sort of thing that would get Met audiences applauding. (theartsdesk.com)

Yannis Thavoris’s sets are works of art in their own right as they sport seventies colours, patterns and décor while also being immensely detailed. The front to the club is a souvenir shop, complete with postcards, Venetian masks, fans and replica gondolier costumes, while the final spinning of the set so that we move with the women as they tumble from one room to another epitomises the slickness demonstrated throughout the evening. (musicomh.com)

There’s a witty movie-titles sequence to start and some colourful, evocative sets by Yannis Thavoris later. Indeed, the final transformation — when the scenery is flipped inside-out to reveal what the women find — is one of the most cleverly timed coups de théâtre I’ve seen this year. (The Times)

Stephen Barlow’s production moves the action forward to the 1970s, while maintaining the Venetian ambience imaginatively conveyed in Yannis Thavoris’s colourful and cleverly revolving quick-change sets. (the guardian)

Stephen Barlow has updated the action to the 1970s: whether Italians fell hook, line and sinker for psychedelic wallpaper, flares, kipper ties and overdesigned gadgets like Britain did, I don’t know, but Barlow and his imaginative designer Yannis Thavoris obviously hope so. Thavoris also outdoes Richard Jones in his flamboyant use of garish wallpaper designs (...) The design fun was matched by the wonderful framing device used for the production – three episodes in a soap opera on Italian television, produced by Canale, whose logo had more-than-a passing resemblance to the old Thames Television – here with the Venice cityscape rising out of, and then being reflected in the lagoon. (classicalsource.com)

Yannis Thavoris’ strongly eloquent design concept places this production at the forefront of 1970s Italian cool: with bold wallpaper designs, sleek plastic furniture and a circular shagpile rug, the club is an immaculate homage to men’s great pleasures: football, fast cars, music, and of course, there’s a (well-chosen) fashion photograph of a stylish girl. The emphasis is on a firmly masculine, exacting sense of fashion and taste: no squishy armchairs, dust or cigar ash here. The club’s entrance is hidden inside a tourist tat shop of Richard Jones proportions, with neat racks of Venetian masks on one side, gondolier outfits on the other, highlighting the ideas of disguise and gender stereotyping constantly at play in this work, while the tourists themselves occasionally invade scenes and scene changes alike to comic effect. (bachtrack.com)

Director Stephen Barlow and his designer Yannis Thavoris translate Le donne curiose to the almost-present, combining the stock characterisation of commedia (...) with the cheerful vulgarity of a 1970s sit-com.

(...) Yannis Thavoris’s sets are colourful and characterful. The bold orange, yellow and brown concentric circle designs, the shag carpet-rug, the bright chrome and plastic furniture, garish lamps, and finally the huge white-leather semi-circular sofa arrangement of the gentleman’s club re-create the height of 1970s (bad) taste. The dark-stained cabinets, extended Formica counters, combo oven/range and the clashing décor of avocado green and burnt orange would have delighted Fanny Craddock.

A tacky souvenir shop is the ‘front’ for the club, the latter signalled only by the symbolic over-sized key-hole in the centre of a rear door. Tourists wander through to flick through post-cards and gawp at the Carnival masks and strip gondoliers’ shirts that hang from the walls. The club interior is a shrine to boys’ toys — football and fast cars, motorbikes and music idols: the characters sport an eclectic array of costumes indicating diverse musical tastes from Frank Zappa to the Bee Gees. There’s a fantastic coup de theatre in the final Act: as the women jostle each other to peer through the keyhole, the whole set swivels and in the blink of an eye outside becomes inside. (operatoday.com)