Adopting a Pose: Barry Millington admires a world-class ‘Tristan’ in West Horsley

Review of Tristan und Isolde, directed Edwards, conducted Barlow, Grange Park, 2023.

November 2023, Volume 17, Number 3, 73–6.

Charles Edwards’s own sets for his new Tristan und Isolde at Grange Park adorn three spaces (one for each act) referencing the iconography of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, more or less contemporaneous with Wagner’s opera. Though none of the chief Pre-Raphaelites – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt – was exactly a paid-up Wagnerite, their celebration of medievalism and myth makes them a natural counterpart for Tristan (the legend of Tristram and Yseult was very much in vogue at the time). As the production unfolds, however, it becomes clear that the association is not merely a decorative one.