Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd will be performed in Norway for the very first time! This is an opera set in a hard masculine environment, about repressed passions and the weight of guilt - but also about rebellion, the power of beauty and about release. Director of Opera Annilese Miskimmon herself directs this masterpiece, featuring an exclusively male cast. Director Annilese Miskimmon and Set and Costume designer Annemarie Woods, take us onto a submarine during the Vichy regime in 1940s France. Here we meet a close and claustrophobic environment, controlled by sailors’ discipline and the meaningless necessity of war.

A machine that turns stones into bread, a bearded lady, a mental hospital and love. This is a journey down a delightfully dark spiral into the mind of a Tom Rakewell. For Tom, the combination of being lackadaisical and greedy is dangerous; and he learns the hard way. He is madly in love with the kind-hearted Anne Trulove, but there’s a hitch – her father wants Tom to have a job, but Tom feels he is not cut out for a life of drudgery! Fortunately, the diabolical Nick Shadow shows up and announces an opportune money inheritance from an obscure uncle, so Tom goes to London in search of happiness… and meets madness on the way.