"Punchy, entertaining staging... leaving everything to his well-drilled performers." - Opera Magazine

"Fresh... unlocked the mysteries." - The Guardian

UCL Culture asking Professor Michael Berkowitz if he'd be interested in bringing The Tsar back was a pretty exciting moment. We were finally able to present it with a full orchestra, professional singers, and give this neglected opera the performance it deserved.

​

One of my favourite parts of that was doing a new English translation for the show, creating something free of anachronisms and the weird word orders one finds in a lot of translations - while hopefully showing off some of the dry and dark humour of the original in all its communistic glory.

​

The Tsar is a strange and wonderful show - I'd never expected to have the chance to revisit it. Staging it with Johann Stuckenbruck conducting, Ed Danon in the title role, and Anna Sideris as the False Angele, was a real pleasure, allowing re-examination of things I was dissatisfied with before, or things that looked very different after the events of 2016-2019.

​

I still had to build the set though. I'm particularly proud of the design and colour scheme for the camera and gun within it.

​

And the cast, of course.