Ruddigore at Opera Holland Park | The Arbuturian
The Victorian penchant for the Gothic and the macabre is well known. It was seen in everything from architecture to popular novels – the blighted ruin created as a folly in aristocratic gardens, the grand guignol madness of the stage heroine, the séance as an after-dinner entertainment. Paranormal researchers looked for evidence of ghosts and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of that most logical of sleuths, Sherlock Holmes, believed in fairies. It was inevitable then, given this ubiquity, that Gilbert and Sullivan would have a pop at it, as they had already done with so many English ins...