Dominic Sandbrook, the historian/podcaster/columnist has joined forces with composer Joseph Phibbs to awaken the dead. Sandbrook co-hosts podcast The Rest is Politics. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Marking Margaret Thatcher’s 100th birth-centenary an opera focused on her celebrated defenestration at the hands of shafted Chancellor Geoffrey Howe ‘with his wife Elspeth as a sort of Lady Macbeth character’, will take to the stage….. (drum roll, cue lights, buy that popcorn) …. When? Where?
Er, …. no one seems to know. Sandbrook has never written a libretto. Phibbs has written one chamber opera, Juliana in 2018. The perfect pairing of opera neophytes. Further announcements in the Spring. Scuttlebutt sniffs the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Don’t expect a 1987 reprise of John Adams’ epoch capturing Nixon in China.
Scuttlebutt offers some helpful guidance on casting. Surely Mrs T., must be Kathryn Lewek, the Connecticut soprano who has blasted out 30 plus Queen of the Night arias in Mozart’s Magic Flute. Especially as Florence Foster Jenkins is no longer around to shriek the role.
And Geoffrey Howe must be a castrato role – because back in 1990 Mogadon Man, as he was known, well and truly was. Even though Mrs T. was forced out of Downing Street three weeks later. The Master hopes to audition as a supernumerary.
