Alcina

Scottish Opera bring Handel's Alcina to the Festival Theatre on 25 and 27 February, with both performances starting at 7.15pm. If you're going on the 27th, there's a pre-show talk at 6pm to get you up to speed before the curtain goes up.

Handel's romantic fantasy is staged here as an operatic fantasy. The title character, Alcina, is a performance artist who captivates the men around her, bending their minds and reality to her will. Things shift when she meets Ruggiero and her heart softens, and his fiancée, disguised as a man, arrives to rescue her lost lover. Director Olivia Fuchs, who helmed the five-star The Makropulos Affair in 2025, relocates the story to a vibrant, flamboyant club scene and plays with opera's power and gender dynamics. The production is built around some of Handel's finest arias, from the aching 'Verdi prati' to the scintillating 'Tornami a vagheggiar', and it's sung in Italian with English supertitles.

Madeline Boreham makes her Company debut in the title role, joined by Scottish Opera's 2026/27 Emerging Artists Charlotte Clapperton (Ruggiero), Charlotte Jane Kennedy (Morgana) and Luvo Maranti (Oronte), and alumni Chloe Harris (Bradamante) and Edward Jowle (Melisso). Dmitri Jurowski conducts, with Olivia Fuchs directing, Yannis Thavoris on design and Jake Wiltshire on lighting. The show runs about 2 hours 30 minutes including a 20-minute interval.

Tickets range from £29.25 to £102.25, with £15 tickets available in advance for under-26s, full-time students and the unwaged with valid ID (these exclude the top two price bands). Both nights start at 7.15pm, and the pre-show talk on the 27th is at 6pm.