‘For the production at Grange Park, director Stephen Langridge and designer George Souglides seem to have been concerned to create a simple, stylish production which was not too overwhelmed with historicising references…. This meant that though Janice Kelly's Elizabetta made her first entrance dressed in full Elizabethan costume, she soon shed this. Souglides costumes included Elizabethan detailing but in simplified form; the women's dresses had a faintly Victorian/Edwardian outline but the bodices were distinctly Elizabethan. This imaginative mixing of styles stretched to the rather distinctively stylish men's suits. For the more formal moments of the opera, the entire cast wore stylised ruffs. The results had a coherent, stylish look which nodded at the work's Elizabethan origins without flooding the stage with fussy detail….. for the ending, Souglides created a memorable coup de théâtre when the black rear wall opened to reveal a staircase going up, glowing with yellow light; the curtains descended as Maria started to ascend up it, presumably to heaven’.
Robert Hugill, Music and Vision
http://www.mvdaily.com/articles/2005/06/stuarda1.htm
