Passion, clowns, vengeance! Ruggero Leoncavallo's fantastic verismo tale of love, jealousy, mental health and revenge. Joyful, sublime music and street performance provide a colourful foil for the ultimate tragedy.

Shakespeare said “All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players”.

A travelling band of performers arrive in an Italian village to provide the evening’s entertainment – but below this surface of joy, colour and art lurks the fragile ecosystem of the performing artists.  This piece explores so brilliantly the lives, egos and trials of the “back stage” world and how closely these can influence the “on stage” world that the audience will see. 

In Natascha Metherell’s take on Pagliacci our audience are the villagers come to see a performance, our singers are the singers come to perform and the performance they perform is about performers performing! 

Pagliacci at its heart is a piece about loneliness, mental health, love, jealousy and revenge – behind the joyful performers that arrive to entertain their audience we find broken and haunted people on the very brink of crisis.  We as an audience watch the double layer – a play within a play – in Act I we meet the performers as they drum up an audience for the evenings show and in Act II we watch the comedy and see how their private torture threatens to infiltrate the drama.

Pagliacci is produced by Søholm Opera