Supporting role

摘要

The Grange, you could argue, is a building in perfect condition as a setting for summer opera - the 'house' is a Greek temple, derelict within, the decaying layers of successive architectural compositions unpeeling. You are detached from the everyday by this ghostly architecture in its isolated landscape setting, helped too by the dress of the opera-goers and the Rajasthan picnic tents, ready for high art and to suspend disbelief of absurd conventions - not recognising a son because he wears a different hat, singing mezzo forte face-to-face. It is necessarily a world apart. As Grange Park Opera (GPO) chief executive Wasfi Kani says, their ambition is that you should 'live for a few hours in a dream'. The Grange at Northington, eight miles north-east of Winchester, arrived at this oddly desirable state by an uncomfortable route. The main house was originally built in 1665-73 to the designs of William Samwell, but then completely recased as a Doric temple by William Wilkins between 1806 and 1816, when, mostly finished, it was sold. The new owner, the Baring family, continued, commissioning Robert Smirke to create a single-storey extension to the west in 1817. In 1823, C R Cockerell was commissioned to add a dining room north of the Smirke extension and also to continue the extension south with new apartments and a conservatory - now the opera venue. In 1852 the Cockerells were back, with F P Cockerell adding another floor to the Smirke wing.