Grange Park Opera is a not-for-profit opera company founded in 1998 by Wasfi Kani and Michael Moody, which stages an annual summer opera festival. It first performed in the Orangery at The Grange in Hampshire, whose auditorium seated around 550 after alterations in 2002. When the Baring family, the owners, exercised a break clause in the lease in 2015, the festival was granted a 99-year lease at West Horsley Place near Guildford, the estate inherited by the author Bamber Gascoigne in 2014. There Tim Ronalds Architects built the Theatre in the Woods, with around 700 seats in five horseshoe tiers modelled on La Scala, Milan. It opened on 8 June 2017 with Puccini's Tosca starring Joseph Calleja. Besides opera, the festival has also staged musicals such as Fiddler on the Roof.
The forest-hidden house sits on the West Horsley Place estate, which TV presenter Bamber Gascoigne unexpectedly inherited from a great-aunt in 2014 — along with 50 hectares of land.
At a glance
- Type
- Opera house
- Location
- Surrey, United Kingdom
- Address
- West Horsley Place, Epsom Road, West Horsley, Surrey KT24 6AN
More venues in United Kingdom
- Apollo Victoria Theatre · Musical theatre, London
- Edinburgh International Festival · Multi-genre theatre, Edinburgh
- Edinburgh Playhouse · Musical theatre, Edinburgh
- English National Opera · Opera house, London
- Glyndebourne · Opera house, Lewes
- His Majesty's Theatre · Musical theatre, London
- London Palladium · Musical theatre, London
- Lyceum Theatre London · Musical theatre, London
- National Theatre · Theatre, London
- Noël Coward Theatre · Musical theatre, London