FringeReview UK 2026

Murder Games

The Opera Makers

Genre: Adaptation, Comedy, Fringe Theatre, International, LGBT Theatre, Live Music, Opera and Operatic Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Grimeborn, Arcola Theatre, Dalston

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

What a perfect marriage of minds this is! Two composers born in 1923 six weeks apart; both known for songs and some instrumental works, both writing in a chic neo-classical idiom. Both uproarious, sexy and subversive. And it’s all over in 80 minutes – and that’s with a generous 20-minute interval.

Madeleine Dring’s Cupboard Love, Ned Rorem’ Three Sisters (Who are Not Sisters) are joined at the hip, as it were, in the very hip generic Murder Games at the Arcola’s Grimeborn season. It’s the brainchild of The Opera Makers, directed by Jonny Danciger, who also designs the shows. With musical director Panaretos Kyriatzidis a the piano,  plays at Arcola’s Studio1 till August 1. Grimeborn

Dring was also an actor and singer, who wrote multiple oboe jokes for her husband and felt she was an alien from the moon. Rorem was a famed memoirist – sex in Turkish baths and waspishly funny takes on the Parisian scene. Both could easily have written their own libretti, and both were exceedingly attractive What a great pity they never met – they could have started a salon. Dring though, a smoker, died in 1977; Rorem nearly made 100, dying in 2022.

Costumes aren’t credited (probably Danciger), but they’re a delight. Starting with Kyriatzidis lurking onstage in deerstalker and cape, and riding up through glamour guignol to matching red-sailors-suits for women, somewhere left-bank of Proust. Danciger’s also responsible for the excellent  lighting.

Cupboard Love

What a pity Dring never heard her own Cupboard Love, a two-hander till it isn’t. With a learned and very droll libretti written for Dring around 1952 by Daniel F Aitken. The title though sounds so Dring (cats mewing for food or here, sex and a body)  you feel the two might have collaborated; or Aitken knew exactly what Dring would respond to. Aitken’s son was in the audience for the second night, seeing it for the first time. After a read-through in 1983 it’s recently been performed multiple times worldwide: in 2018, 2019, 2023 and now.

Kyriatzidis starts with aplomb at the upright. It’s a quite a big overture for a short work, another Dring joke. Anyone who knows her catchy and effervescent Festival Scherzo for Piano and Strings written for the 1951 Festival of Britain will recognize the Dring sound of glissandi whoops, cascading off-Les Six-melody and clarity, the mordant and memorable tune arising out of a pseudo-gloopy Alan Rawsthorne-like opening. Definitely a joke.

Then in the opera itself we’re reminded of Dring the songwriter, most famously for her Betjeman settings (‘The Night Hostess’ shiveringly close to home). Here though even that light seriousness is blown away.

Louisa Tee (the Wife) has a superb soprano at her command, Rich and creamy at the top, terrific projection and a sexy slide to all the kittenish mezzo growl you could wish for. She’s about to get amorous with Masimba Ushe as ‘He’ her lover, and there seems to be a pharmacy all around them in white stands with coloured liquids. What a suggestive set that is. Before they can get intimate though He discovers a boy. This turns out to be the very haulable Ellie Westbrook as It or the Husband…

Wife wants to know how he died. No obvious wounds, but why does she suggest poison? Well the props might be a clue, or not. Accusations turn tables as the paid argue it out with OTT Italian verismo (French-filtered), with climax after climax of… angst. However the solution stares them in the face.

How this ends is the most cheerful of black comedies I’ve seen for a while. Perhaps its sheer exuberance in dealing with imagined hanging judges and the like were one reason for no-one daring to put it on. Ushe matches Tee as a singer, with a resonant baritone that reaches to basso depths. They’re a terrific pairing, vocally the richest of the evening.  Sadly Tee doesn’t reappear after her virtuoso workout, though Ushe does, and so does the dragged-about knocked-about Westbrook.

The sprach-style too is quite continental, one might say, like a kiss on the hand. At several points Tee, and at one point Ushe break into speech. It was an old convention slowly dropped in the 19^th century (Bizet’s Carmen was the last major work and that soon got padded with bad substitutes after his death). But this is another witty innovation. Nothing quite like it appeared in the UK, till at least the mid 1960s.

Anyone anting to explore Dring should head for those works mentioned and the wonderful Trio for Flute, Oboe and Piano, and her multiple works for Oboe written for husband John Lord.

Three Sisters (Who are Not Sisters)

In Ned Rorem’s Three Sisters (Who are Not Sisters) Ushe is one man joined by Eamonn Walsh as his brother Samuel, but the title is – the parentheses suggest it – by Gertrude Stein, written as a play in 1943, one of her last works, written (amazingly) in occupied France. Since she died in 1946, this 1968 work, staged in 1971, is a posthumous collaboration. Rorem one feels had no difficulty adapting it.

The three un-Chekhovian sisters (it’s endlessly suggestive) are orphans. It’s a bit Ballet Shoes, and a bit not. So are they elective sisters? Mmm. Westbrook’s Jenny is the lead sister who suggests a game after an elaborately chalked hopscotch of 19 places is rubbed out, joined by Helen’s Kristina Ammattil (a striking voice) and Ellen’s resonant Salome Siu.

Westbrook with a commanding lyric soprano carries off the lead conspirer with swagger and comedic forensics, archly pointed in her acting style. They’re playing murder but what if real murder’s attempted? So Walsh’s Samuel joins this clamour – he sings briefly but with a sinister tenor, a light-hearted Don Giovanni. They both assert they’re the murderer at different points; as each of the other three fall victim. Soon chalk outlines and then empty chalk outlines suggest all kinds of death.

No spoilers but when from a darkened Studio 1 all the singers lie prone and intone a movingly blended chorus that “we’re all dead” you wonder what in 1943 Stein – and later Rorem – were thinking. Being Stein, this is a sleight-of-profound, teasingly moving work. And being Rorem, the music – arch, funny, sometimes lyrically ardent – underscores this perfectly. Few since Britten can match Rorem for shading a word or its meaning. The work asks existential questions perkily. It’s no coincidence that Camus’ L’étranger was published the previous year. This is playful, in the way that Debussy’s 1913 Cocteau-concocted ballet Jeux is playful. And a little bit not.

There’s a good deal of Rorem available. His piano concertos and symphonies are on Naxos, and his art-songs – the very last gasp of French and American of their kind – everywhere.

A hidden gem, and a marriage-which-is-not-a-marriage, made in opera heaven. With exemplary performances, this is where to see both works. But hurry.

Producer Antonia Gentile.

Published July 31, 2026August 1, 2026 by Simon Jenner