Performer: Sheridan Edward

Opera Loki's stylish Victorian Rigoletto, one piano accompaniment and much grease-paint later, is an enjoyable and moving evening, though it doesn't quite get to the heart of Verdi's dark masterpiece. 

Weather forecasters would have a meteorological field day with Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Snow Maiden. Freezing temperatures have prevailed for sixteen years, and the immediate outlook in the Prologue is for further isolated snow showers, before a warm front eventually sweeps in from the south during Act IV. 

The King’s Head Theatre in Islington is, as one might suspect from the name, in the back of a pub. Founded in 1970, it was the first pub theatre to open in London since Shakespeare’s time. Housed in a back room that used to contain a boxing ring, it is tiny: tightly packed seating for maybe 60 or 70 people and an unelevated stage, beginning where the seating stops.