#mark-anthony-turnage

#mark-anthony-turnage

When Mark-Anthony Turnage announces a new opera, ears prick up. Few living composers have such a knack for turning the familiar into the unsettling, mixing spiky jazz-inflected rhythms with sly humour and aching lyricism. His latest project, The Railway Children, is taken from Edith Nesbit's classic Edwardian children's tale. Turnage and his librettist, the director-writer Rachael Hewer, have re-engineered the tale into a family-friendly Cold War thriller set in 1984. Think Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan dancing to Prince and Culture Club.