The Galloping Cure – Festival Theatre

Oh my God. What just happened to opera?

Missy Mazzoli’s The Galloping Cure absolutely blew me away in its first half. Not merely as opera, but as theatre, music and visual spectacle colliding in something that felt, genuinely, like a tipping point.

If this is what modern opera is going to be, it has a wonderful life ahead of it.

Everything begins relatively straight. The music, the characters, the world. Then gradually it starts to contort. The familiar bends out of shape and suddenly we are somewhere else entirely. There are echoes of The Music Man, flashes of Carousel, and then we seem to tumble headlong into The Matrix, vertical lines of light streaming through the Festival Theatre stage as though we are stepping between realities.

At the centre are the horses and the promise: your first ride is free.

The opioid metaphor is hardly concealed, nor should it be. But there is much more going on. Big Pharma is here. The authority of the doctor is here. The vulnerability of the young, the commercialisation of pain and, perhaps most disturbingly, society’s complicity in allowing all of it to happen.

“The doctor is always right.”

Except, of course, when the entire system is wrong.

Tom Morris’s production turns Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s creation into an extraordinary visual feast. Rebecca Ringst’s design, Lucy Carter’s lighting and Will Duke’s projections combine with Stuart Stratford and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera to create moments of almost overwhelming theatrical power.

After the wonderful high of the first half comes the inevitably bleak outcomes of the second.

We crave the drug of the bright lights and flying horses but are given instead cold turkey in the form of body mutilation and darkness. So, the extraordinary complexity and joy built before the interval begins to drain away, and we crave it, exactly as intended. Brilliant.

Because that first half is among the most exciting things I have ever seen in a theatre. It demonstrates an opera capable of speaking beyond its traditional audience without compromising its musical ambition. Indeed, the collision of forms is precisely what makes it so exciting.

I only wish more people could have see it. There are simply not enough performances.

If somebody believes opera is not for them, or that opera is dead, take them to The Galloping Cure. This is Big Pharma, addiction, medicine, commerce, youth, complicity and spectacle thrown together for the world we actually inhabit.

This is an opera for our time, if we have any time left.

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 12th August 2026

North West End UK Rating:

Running time – 2hrs 30mins (with interval)