An exciting, anything-goes opera festival that rips up the rulebook and writes something radically new. Opera reinvented, rewired, and reborn.
Grimeborn Opera Festival 2025 will defy expectations with reworked classics, urgent new stories, and unexpected takes on the opera canon - all in an intimate, up-close setting. This year’s festival allows the past and present to intertwine, with classic tales refracted through contemporary anxieties, and opera reclaimed as a vital, living art form for today.
Emotional immediacy defines this year’s programme, as epic classics are reimagined through radical lenses. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is transformed into a visceral chamber experience, while Becoming Tosca places the heroine in the midst of Latin American political unrest. The haunting psychology of Lucia di Lammermoor pulses through raw, gothic staging, and Don Giovanni’s exhilarating charisma is interrogated in a stripped-back take on Mozart’s masterpiece.
Literary icons find new life through music, with Sense & Sensibility: The Musical returning, and Jane Eyre, an Arcola Theatre co-production, elevated by the operatic language of John Joubert. Meanwhile, the digital age collides with operatic tradition in The Elixir of Love (Re-imagined), where Baseless Fabric injects Donizetti’s brilliance with the rhythm of the online world.
Sustainability and innovation takecentre stage as Green Opera’s TESTAMENT invites audiences into an exploration of humanity’s evolving relationship with the natural world.