Annilese Miskimmon
They are often reset in the twentieth century, with several stagings employing Miskimmon's native Ireland as the setting, including Janáček's Jenufa (2015), Bellini's I Puritani (2015) and Puccini's Suor Angelica (2024).
[6] While a student she started to direct theatre and opera,[4] including Cambridge productions of Johann Christian Bach's Endimione[3] and in 1996, Arianna, an early performance of Alexander Goehr's response to a lost work by Monteverdi, which received reviews in the national press.
That year, Miskimmon co-directed, with Ingrid Craigie, the Irish premiere of Grigory Frid's The Diary of Anne Frank, in what was announced as the company's final production.
[21][22] Closure was averted,[23] and Miskimmon's last production with the company came the following year: Mozart's The Magic Flute, re-imagined in early 20th-century London, with a minimal set designed by Nicky Shaw.
[28] The opera writer Andrew Mellor (quoted in the New York Times) said that she created "several innovative productions" in Denmark, which "became talking points"; in addition to Così fan tutte, he highlighted her commission Brothers, which addresses post-traumatic stress in Afghanistan veterans.
[13][25] The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten's opera reviewer, Maren Ørstavik (quoted in the New York Times), praised Miskimmon during her tenure there for making good artistic choices, as well as for having a gift for understanding what will please an audience.
[33] The same year she directed Handel's Semele with the British Youth Opera at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London; Thicknesse, in a review for the Times, commends some of Miskimmon's directorial ideas but feels that the production was "undone by overambition".
[34] In 2007, she directed a production of Mozart's early work, Il re pastore, at Garsington Opera, which Geoff Brown, in a review for the Times, writes "teases enough to twinkle, but never to irk".
[37] In 2009, she directed Handel's Orlando at Buxton, in a production set in a hospital ward, which, according to Finch, at times approached Doctor in the House but "comes into its own" with a shower of giant poppy petals that accompanied the central character's madness.
[26] In 2014, she directed Britten's The Turn of the Screw with Opera Holland Park, in a production that the American critic Wendy Lesser describes as an "artistic miracle" in which "[t]he unnatural, the unlikely, was clearly the rule of the day", also praising the spare classroom setting that facilitated the movement of the ghosts.
[43] Later that year, Miskimmon staged Bellini's I Puritani with the Welsh National Opera, re-envisaging the Roundheads of the original as Orangemen in 1970s Belfast, a conceit that Maddocks in the Observer and Rian Evans in the Guardian each praise,[44][45] but Michael Tanner, in a more-balanced review for The Spectator, criticises.
[51] Her production that year of Ambroise Thomas's Mignon at Buxton Festival is described by Andrew Clark in the Financial Times as embracing the period sensibility of the piece, "preserving the innocence of the story and sprinkling it with fairy-dust".
[10][54] The choice of Poul Ruders' The Handmaid's Tale for her first conventional production at ENO in April 2022 is described by Nicholas Kenyon in the Telegraph as a "brave move... vindicated" by a "totally committed and communicative" performance that attracted a younger-than-usual audience.
[10] In a September 2024 production of Puccini's Suor Angelica that was among the Telegraph's top five operas of the year,[57] Miskimmon moved the setting from Italy to Ireland's Magdalene Laundries.
