THIRTY YEARS OF BAMPTON CLASSICAL OPERA

The Comedy of Errors (only the second-ever production in England) had proved a casting nightmare, requiring ‘twin’ baritones and ‘twin’ tenors. The baritones proved fairly easy and we found two excellent ‘twinable’ singer-actors, Mark Saberton and Thomas Guthrie, who continued performing for us for several years. Tenors, a rare species at the best of times, proved trickier: we lost one from our first pairing, and then one from our second pairing, but eventually our final twins of Benjamin Hulett and David Murphy proved more enduring. In a smaller role was 19 year-old Nicholas Merryweather, who matured into a wonderful and breathtakingly comic singer, performing eleven further roles with us over many years. A nonsinging role went to 8 year-old Rosa French, Gilly’s niece, the first of several appearances for us; Rosa later trained as an actor and magnificently recited the commentary in our 2021 ‘pandemic’ performances of Gluck’s The Crown (La corona). Comedy was very well received and reviewed in the national papers, especially by Roddy Dunnett (“Bampton’s production put scarcely a foot wrong”) and Robert Thicknesse, and these laudatory reviews led to an invitation to revive it the following

March at the Bath Shakespeare Festival in the magnificent Theatre Royal. Our Bampton scenery was too small for such a large stage, and so we agreed on a semi-staged performance, in modern dress. Dealing with a large professional theatre proved a steep learning curve for us, and it was inevitable that there were problems to iron out. We now had a different