OperaUpClose

Eugene Onegin

Olivier Award-winning OperaUpClose comes to Arcola for the first time with a new English version of Tchaikovsky’s sweeping opera, Eugene Onegin.

With a narrative that is both romantic and thought-provoking, the central character is the fiercely intelligent but naïve Tatyana, whose entanglement with Onegin results in a wiser, sadder but ultimately self-reliant heroine.

This new chamber version will transpose the story of Tatyana’s sexual awakening to the early 1960s, a world on the cusp of the women’s liberation movement when new thinking fought against the old ways. Infatuation and self-control do battle in well-tailored world of sleek suits, with seasonal allusions to the snow-swept Russian landscape of the original.

This is a coming-of-age story, a requiem for lost innocence and triumphant celebration of hard-won independence – told through some of the most glorious vocal music ever written.


OperaUpClose is a small, ambitious, Olivier Award-winning touring opera company (registered charity no. 1153307) producing innovatively staged, unintimidating and affordable re-imaginings of well-known works and premieres of new operas. Since our foundation in 2009, OperaUpClose has produced 28 operas: six world premieres of contemporary operas and twenty-two classic operas in newly commissioned chamber orchestrations and new English librettos.

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