Orson Welles as Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight.
The Leeds Opera Festival has come up with an appropriate celebration in honor of Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff.
Britain’s Northern Opera Group will present A Feast for Falstaff on Sunday, August 25, as part of the five-day opera festival.
Guests will enjoy drinks and a sumptuous buffet to the accompaniment of pieces from three Falstaff operas composed by Verdi, Salieri and Balfe.
Following the food, drink and opera, there will be a screening of Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight.
The film follows the story of Sir John Falstaff across five of Shakespeare’s plays. It stars Welles as Falstaff, Keith Baxter as Prince Hal, John Gielgud as Henry IV, Jeanne Moreau as Doll Tearsheet and Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly.
Chimes at Midnight won the 20th Anniversary Prize and Technical Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966. It was hailed by The New York Times as “the greatest Shakespearean film ever made, bar none,” while the late Roger Ebert described it as “a magnificent film, clearly among Welles’ greatest work.”
Welles played Falstaff in his 1939 stage production Five Kings opposite Burgess Meredith as Prince Hal. He played Falstaff again in a 1960 Irish stage production of Chimes in Midnight before shooting the film of the same name in Spain several years later. He held the movie in high regard.
“If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that’s the one I would offer up,” he told the BBC’s Leslie Megahey in 1982. ” I think it’s because it is to me the least flawed; let me put it that way. It is the most successful for what I tried to do. I succeeded more completely in my view with that than with anything else.”
Tickets for A Feast for Falstaff are £30, including food, drink on arrival, opera and the film.
A Feast for Falstaff will take place at Heart Centre Headingley in West Yorkshire
For more details, visit northernoperagroup.co.uk
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