The Grimeborn Opera Festival returns for its 19th year at Arcola Theatre, promising an exciting, anything-goes opera festival that rips up the rulebook and writes something radically new.
Arcola Theatre today announced the full programme of productions for the 2025 festival. Arcola Artistic Director Mehmet Ergen said: “Once again we are thrilled to present our annual Opera festival to Arcola audiences. Grimeborn 2025 will bring us thought-provoking interpretations of classic and new works, opening up the genre to current and new audiences. This year’s radical experience goes hand in hand with our environmental commitment.”
Grimeborn defies expectations with reworked classics, urgent new stories, and unexpected takes on the opera canon—all in an intimate, up-close setting. This year’s festival allows the past and present to intertwine, with classic tales refracted through contemporary anxieties, and opera reclaimed as a vital, living art form for today.
Emotional immediacy defines this year’s programme, as epic classics are reimagined through radical lenses. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is transformed into a visceral chamber experience, while Becoming Tosca places the heroine in the midst of Latin American political unrest. The haunting psychology of Lucia di Lammermoor pulses through raw, gothic staging, and Don Giovanni’s exhilarating charisma is interrogated in a stripped-back take on Mozart’s masterpiece.
Literary icons find new life through music, with Sense & Sensibility: The Musical and Jane Eyre, an Arcola Theatre co-production, elevated by the operatic language of John Joubert. Meanwhile, the digital age collides with operatic tradition in The Elixir of Love (Re-imagined), where Baseless Fabric injects Donizetti’s brilliance with the rhythm of the online world. Sustainability and innovation take centre stage as Green Opera’s TESTAMENT invites audiences into an exploration of humanity’s evolving relationship with the natural world.
From adaptations of Jane Austen to the social media crazes of the day, Grimeborn 2025 has it all.
The Season in Detail:
- TESTAMENT (16 – 19 July): Sustainable opera company, Green Opera, brings an immersive experience linking centuries of vocal music to our shifting relationship with nature.
- The Elixir of Love (Re-imagined) (29 July – 2 August): A modern rom-com that fuses Donizetti’s timeless charm with a social media twist from Baseless Fabric.
- Jane Eyre (6 – 9 August): Arcola Theatre and Green Opera present John Joubert’s bold new adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s literary masterpiece.
- Tristan und Isolde (13 – 16 August): Wagner’s epic features an electrifying new chamber production staged in-the-round with a brand-new orchestration.
- Sense & Sensibility: The Musical (19 – 23 August): The production returns in a new chamber setting after 2024’s sold-out run, bringing soaring songs and Jane Austen’s biting wit.
- Don Giovanni (26 – 30 August): Ensemble OrQuesta returns to Grimeborn with a stripped-back version of the second opera of the Da Ponte trilogy.
- Becoming Tosca (2 – 6 September): Puccini’s opera reimagined in a politically charged Latin American setting, with new music alongside his original score.
- Lucia di Lammermoor (9 – 13 September): Gothic obsession and mental unravelling brought to visceral life by Barefoot Opera.
Listings and ticket information can be found here.
