Murder Games: A Double Bill is showing as part of the six-week long Grimeborn Opera Festival at the Arcola Theatre. Now in its nineteenth year Grimeborn champions new and experimental works, reimagining opera for contemporary audiences.

First up is Cupboard Love, Madeleine Dring’s one act opera, an hilarious Whodunnit for three voices and a piano. The Wife and The Boyfriend are planning a romantic interlude when the cuckolded Husband (the third voice) descends from a cupboard; dead! Each think the other killed him before he awakens (as a ghost presumably) to tell them he has committed suicide and framed them for his murder.   

As the corpse, Elle Westbrook delivers superb physical comedy, spending much of the opera being thrown from her chair and unceremoniously manhandled. Both Tee (The Wife) and Masimba Ushe, as the boyfriend, are outstanding, combining warmth and comic timing with impressive vocal clarity. Their precise diction and assured delivery meet the challenge of the opera’s tongue-twisting text.

The second offering is Three Sister Who are Not Sisters is rooted in childhood fantasy, the opera follows the three sisters, all orphans with different fathers and different mothers, and two biological brothers.

Masimba Ushe and Elle Westbrook are joined by Salome Siu (mezzo-soprano), Kristina Ammattil (soprano), and Eamonn Walsh (tenor), who is the hilariously campest of school boys and policeman. The cast is uniformly impressive, with ensemble numbers of remarkable power that fill the intimate space of the Arcola Theatre.

Being bored the children invent a murderous game, with characters dispatched one by one. The children’s murder game turns increasingly surreal as they kill one another in a series of playful, theatrical scenes. Samuel, disguised as a policeman, becomes the final would-be murderer before Jenny fights back and kills him. After his dying aria, all five voices are heard in darkness, and the children reappear unharmed, questioning whether they were ever dead.

Productions like Murder Games, pairing two fast-paced operas in a polished, highly entertaining evening, challenge assumptions about the art form. They demonstrate that opera can be fresh, accessible and innovative, offering a compelling answer to the question: what is opera, and who is it for?

Four Stars.

Reviewed by Nina Gardner

Photo credit Marc Gascoigne

Cast

Cupboard Love
The Wife – Louisa Tee
The Boyfriend _ Masimba Ushe
The Husband – Ellie Westbrook
Music by Madeleine Dring
Libretto by D. F. Aitken

Three Sister Who are Not Sisters

Jenny – Ellie Westbrook
Helen – Kristina Ammattil
Ellen – Salome Siu
Samuel – Eamonn Walsh
Sylvester – Masimba Ushe

Creatives
Music by Ned Rorem
Libretto by Gertrude Stein

Jonny Danciger – Director and Designer
Panaretos Kyriatzidis – Musical Director

Murder Games; A Double Bill is showing at The Arcola Theatre  29 July to 1 August 2026

For Tickets and Further details see the link below