Neil Bartlett

Bartlett’s theatre productions have frequently used live music . His production of The Game of Love and Chance for the National in orchestrated the  entire proceedings  around a grand piano, and in his 2004  Dido, Queen of Carthage  Marlowe’s verse was underscored by a live consort of viols playing the music of seventeenth century composer William Lawes. His music-theatre projects with Gloria, created in collaboration with composer Nicolas Bloomfield, ranged in form from chamber opera (Sarrasine, with a libretto after Balzac,  Lady Into Fox,  libretto after David Garnett) to a musical thriller (A Judgement In Stone, libretto after Ruth Rendell ) and a musical comedy (Night after Night, a homage to the London West End of the late 1950’s).

At the Lyric, his music projects included  a staging of Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo with Toby Spence; a collaboration with The Tiger Lillies and The Kronos Quartet, The Gorey End (featuring performances by Alan Rickman, Julian Bleach, Eleanor Bron and Miranda Richardson); and a staged concert of music-hall and vaudeville numbers, Strange How Potent, featuring Linda Thompson, Martha Wainwright and Justin Bond.

In 2006, he was invited to stage his first professional opera ; The Rake’s Progress, for the Aldeburgh Festival, with the Philharmonia Orchestra. He returned to Snape in October 2009 to create a new production of Britten's The Turn of the Screw , staged in the intimate surroundings of the new studio- theatre ..

The Rake's Progress, Aldeburgh Festival 2006. Designed by Rae Smith.

The Turn of the Screw Aldeburgh 2009

The Turn of the Screw Aldeburgh 2009

For a full chronology of Neil Bartlett’s opera and  music-theatre productions, please got to his CV in ABOUT NEIL