How is it, that in eighteen years, I have never once visited the Opera in Holland Park? I made my debut on Saturday night at a glorious performance of Tchaikovsky’s irresistibly melodic and lyrical Iolanta and I shall sign up for next season immediately.

I had absolutely no idea what a wonderful experience this is. The theatre, seating over 1,000 people, has lately been improved with comfotable seating and and large white side panels to complement the marquee structure. A curtain raiser, a dance version of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, had the peacocks in the park squawking in unison with the oboes.

The setting is magical. The original Jacobean castle, latterly known as Holland House, was bombed in the Second World War and gradually and partially restored around its formal gardens and the orangery, which serve as picnic areas and walkways.

Tchaikovsky’s one-act opera is a hymn to light in the story of a blind princess discovering her true love and recovering her sight. Why it’s not better known is an utter mystery to me now, and I shall make a bee-line for the concert performance conducted by Vladimir Jurowski at the Royal Festival Hall on 25 October.

Hugh Canning of the Sunday Times told me that he had only ever seen the piece twice before, and the audience was palpably astonished. Mind you, even Pulcinella, Stravinsky’s sharply elegant elaboration of music by Pergolesi, took some of them by surprise.

The trouble with going to opera, except for the ENO at the Coliseum, is that it’s all a bit of a hoo-ha.

Glyndebourne means dressing up and setting off two days in advance. For Grange Park in Hampshire, which I love, you have to allow a week. But Holland Park, even for North Londoners, is easy-peasy; you can’t park over there very easily, but you can jump on a Number 27 bus and go straight to the park gates.

I was pretty much al fresco all weekend, Holland Park punctuating two visits to London Bridge: on the first, I turned right and went to the Scoop; on the second, I turned left and went to the Globe. As I’m due at the Menier Chocolate Factory this evening for They’re Playing Our Song, I might as well have pitched camp on the river with an exeat for the opera.     

The Scoop free theatre season offers Lorca’s Blood Wedding in Ted Hughes’s marvellous translation, and it’s not bad at all. But I was even happier to catch one of the last few performances of Che Walker’s The Frontline at the Globe last night.

Here is a teeming new Jonsonian city comedy with the tang of harsh reality, a goodly selection of Madness-type songs, a stage full of wonderful characters and an audience who sat and stood entranced throughout a complete downpour during the first act.

It is a canny ploy of Dominic Dromgoole to browbeat contemporary playwrights into writing for the Globe where the demands of scale, roughness and attention-fixing are likely to raise their game in a way, perhaps, the RSC can no longer hope to do.

I don’t think we’ve seeen anything quite like this since Howard Brenton’s Derby day epic, Epsom Downs, and that was a very long time ago indeed. I live near Camden Lock and I would no more choose to spend any time there than I would at a body-piercing convention for smack heads and Amy Winehouse lookalikes (the same thing, really).

Walker manages, though,  to transform this unpromising street life material into something gorgeous, funny and finally moving: bravo, and pass the spliff, man. But even Lorca and Walker must bow to the transcendent Pyotr Ilyich: we like Tchaik, and we love Opera Holland Park!
 

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