British stage director Jack Furness is the founder and Artistic Director of Shadwell Opera. He studied music at Cambridge University, where he received a double first-class honours degree, and in the 2015-16 season he was an Emerging Artist Director for Scottish Opera.
Recent directing credits include Candide (Scottish Opera); Rusalka (Garsington Opera, Edinburgh International Festival); Don Giovanni (Nevill Holt Opera); Gianni Schicchi (Copenhagen Opera Festival); Dido and Aeneas (Royal Academy of Music); revival of David McVicar’s production of Carmen (Dallas Opera); revival of Kasper Holten’s production of Don Giovanni (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden); Così fan tutte, Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Teatru Manoel, Malta); Iolanta and Opera Highlights tour (Scottish Opera); The Rape of Lucretia (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland); Written on Skin and Lessons in Love and Violence (Melos Sinfonia in St Petersburg); Kurt Weill’s Down in the Valley and Der Jasager (Opera North Youth Company and Scottish Opera Connect Company at the Aberdeen International Youth Theatre Festival); Amadis de Gaule (University College Opera); Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel (Wexford Festival); Eugene Onegin (Ryedale Festival Opera); Falstaff (Opera Integra); I Found My Horn (Marlowe Society); two short opera films for Shadwell Opera which were broadcast on Channel 4 and watched by over 400,000 people worldwide and a promotional film for Blackheath Community Halls Opera.
For Shadwell Opera, he has directed Oliver Knussen’s Where the Wild Things Are (Alexandra Palace Theatre and Mariinsky Concert Hall, St Petersburg); Albert Herring (Opera Holland Park); Die Zauberflöte, which won a 2009 RBS Herald Angel Award (Edinburgh Fringe Festival); Così fan tutte, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jonathan Dove’s Siren Song, and In the Penal Colony (Arts Theatre, Leicester Square); Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse and a double bill of Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Mark Anthony Turnage’s Twice through the Heart (Hackney Showroom); Speech Acts – a double-bill of George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill and Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale (Courtyard Theatre); and Song – a double bill of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (Bart’s Pathology Museum).
Furness has assisted directors such as Sir David McVicar and Yoshi Oida at companies including the Glyndebourne Festival, Royal Opera House, English National Opera, Opera North and Scottish Opera. He has recently assisted on Laurent Pelly’s production of L’elisir d’amore, Andrei Serban’s production of Turandot and a new production of Der Rosenkavalier by Robert Carsen, all at the Royal Opera House.
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Candide
Scottish Opera, August 2022
Jack Furness’s brilliant and bold new production takes an entirely fresh look at the piece.
Staged as a promenade performance in a marquee in the company’s production studios […] this production reimagines Candide for the social media age.
This is a totally immersive production in which the action takes place around, above and through the audience, the visual focus shifting as the action moves from one location to the next.
The result is a performance that is witty and engaging but ultimately also deeply moving.
Rowena Smith, The Guardian ★★★★★
Scottish Opera's promenade production of Bernstein's 1956 score is brilliantly bold, hilariously decadent and superbly sung
Directed by Jack Furness – whose magnificent staging of Dvorak’s Rusalka has been the toast of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival – it is a brilliantly bold production.
...it’s clear that Furness has brought Voltaire’s narrative firmly into the 21st century.
Mark Bown, The Telegraph ★★★★★
...a vast open performance space in which the audience had to be as nimble and mobile as Furness’ staging, which darted incessantly between scattered performing stations.
Furness and designer Tim Meacock give us an all-action, hard-hitting Candide. Referencing the supercharged mania of Reality TV and social media, it sits perfectly with the utter idiocy of the Voltaire-inspired plot, taking us on a chaotic global tour with oddities whose antics are as unlikely as they are hideous.
Ken Walton, The Scotsman ★★★★★
Jack Furness: by a curious coincidence, the director of that stunning Rusalka here producing Scotland’s operatic event of the summer on the opposite side of the country.
...generating a carnival-like sense of occasion and a joyous, headlong momentum. Furness fired visual gags like chaff
Richard Bratby, The Spectator
Director Jack Furness makes different corners of the space represent different locations, adding to the story what might almost pass for clarity, and the absurd coincidences and stock characters are sent up with some larger-than-life performances and costumes.
Simon Thompson, The Times ★★★★
Rusalka
Garsington Opera, Edinburgh International Festival, August 2022
...it was not only a revelation in changing my view of ‘Rusalka’, it was one of the best nights I’ve spent in an opera house for years!
I was blown away by the whole experience; firstly and most strikingly by the set - a lake dominating the stage of the Festival Theatre and revealed by a giant roof which lifted to reveal the underwater life of the water nymphs below. […] This was a visually stunning production which kept your attention in what with two intervals is a very long evening.
My pleasure at the performance was shared by the whole audience […] at the end the Festival Theatre audience rose to give the cast a standing ovation.
Hugh Kerr, Edinburgh Music Review
This production, premiered by Garsington Opera earlier this summer, is an absolute triumph. Furness and his designers and cast have worked seamlessly to create a vision that tells the tale simply, yet exquisitely. Every moment is measured and clear.
...this production is both thrilling and heart-breaking”
At the final curtain there was a spontaneous standing ovation from the entire audience.
Haunting, heart-breaking and honest.
Fraser Grant, Musical Theatre Review ★★★★★
sumptuous rendition of a watery fable
Christopher Lambton, The Arts Desk
Rusalka […] was beautifully brought to life in director Jack Furness’s debut production with Garsington Opera
Miranda Heggle, The List
Furness eschews a didactic approach to Dvorak’s fairytale but, if there is a moral, it is Be Careful What You Wish For. You couldn’t wish for better than this.”
Catriona Graham, The Opera Critic
Utterly fabulous is the best way to describe the experience of Rusalka at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival.
Director Jack Furness has created that rarest of things, the complete operatic experience. In turns glorious, sweet, bathed in romance, but never shying from the fable’s dark heart, Rusalka is quite the emotional rollercoaster. It was, and is, a privilege to experience.
WJ Quinn, The QR.com ★★★★★
Rusalka
Garsington Opera, June 2022
But, for Rusalka, black curtains are drawn around the sides of the structure for the first of the three acts, creating a genuinely magical opening to a piece that begins by a lake in a forest glade – visualised to powerful effect in Tom Piper’s immense, adaptable set, whose possibilities are seized upon by Furness. His approach focuses on the essentials of narrative, character and situation.
George Hall, The Stage ★★★★★
Avoiding fashionable post-Freudian glosses, Furness keeps us more or less within the bounds of fairytale, imbuing the opera with a genuine, if slightly sinister magic.
Tim Ashley, The Guardian ★★★★
the director Jack Furness emphasises a post-industrial aesthetic: even the moonlight in Rusalka's famous Song to the Moon shines through a hole in the rusty metal cistern that dominates Tom Piper's set. [...] Rusalka is a warning in the guise of a fairy tale, Furness still favours clear story-telling over the psychologically penetrating insights of some past productions.
John Allison, The Telegraph ★★★★
Don Giovanni
Nevill Holt Opera, August 2021
On paper, [Jack Furness’s] directorial notion of treating the nuptials of Masetto and Zerlina as a ‘unifying backbone’ to the piece, and incorporating folk rituals into the 17th-century visuals, might seem tangential; but in practice the production is entirely successful in holding the original’s blend of low comedy and high drama together in a convincing way. Don Giovanni’s undermining of societal structures is as clear as his purely selfish motivation: his eventual damnation is shattering in its impact.
George Hall, The Stage ★★★★★
Mozart's Don Giovanni is an opera which takes place in an urban landscape, much of it at night, so setting the piece outdoors in the middle of the afternoon might seem something of a stretch. But for their production of Mozart's Don Giovanni (seen Sunday 22 August 2021), Nevill Holt Opera and director Jack Furness have risen to the challenge.
The production mixed the funny and the serious in fine manner. The result was one of the most satisfying productions of Don Giovanni that I have seen in a long time, lacking any annoying directorial pensées and creative rewriting of the plot.
Robert Hugill, Planet Hugill
As smoke billowed into the night air from a burning straw man, the disgraced Don Giovanni’s relationship with his guilty partner, Leporello, came to an end. And so, ends a lifetime’s devotion to womanising. With this very believable outcome, Nevill Holt’s remarkable production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni ends what has proven to be the bravest of outdoor country opera seasons in 2021. Director Jack Furness has worked wonders with a vast green mound in the middle of Leicestershire’s finest countryside.
Clive Peacock, Seen and Heard International
Outlined in his programme note, Furness's scheme was to play a discrete version (Vienna, 1788) rather the usual blend of that and the original (Prague, 1787). It worked well. So did, more surprisingly, his introduction of European folk elements into a 17th-century set of visuals...
George Hall, Opera Now ★★★★★
The Rape of Lucretia
Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, January 2020
This staging by director Jack Furness resolves many of its difficulties, however, by dropping the pagan Roman warriors and their wives into a contemporary military battlefield hospital, with the male and female chorus characters as an army chaplain and a Red Cross paramedic, in whose voices the Christian message is sung. The double time-line is both visually striking and a familiar trope of contemporary fiction and television drama, as it could not have been 75 years ago.
Keith Bruce, The Herald
… director Jack Furness’ inspired choice of British soldiers in a military war zone abroad was an innovative and powerful take for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland on Britten’s classical tale seen through the telescope of time.
David Smythe, Bachtrack
Where the Wild Things Are
Shadwell Opera, Alexandra Palace
An audience including many kids engaged effortlessly with Jack Furness’s simple but effective production ... Delivered by a highly energetic group of principals, Furness’s production – with sweeties and balloons (literally) thrown in – was unalloyed fun.
George Hall, The Stage
... this lo-fi but uproarious production deserves the chance to be seen more widely around the country... Jack Furness's staging boasted eccentric monsters (amazing what you can do with Seventies rock-god wigs and yellow Marigolds) and simple but striking effects.
Neil Fisher, The Times
Don Giovanni (Revival Director)
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, September 2019
Es Devlin’s busy set has felt intrusively hyperactive on previous viewings, but at this revival directed by Jack Furness the show has a more consistent focus than hitherto.
George Hall, The Stage
Either Jack Furness, the revival director of the Royal Opera’s 2014 Mozart production, has been given remarkable licence to pep up Kasper Holten’s original staging or I am getting soft-hearted in my mature years. Either way, I found this show far more emotionally compelling than on its previous outing a year ago.
Richard Morrison, The Times
The Lighthouse
Shadwell Opera, Hackney Showroom, November 2017
Hackney Showroom is a long way from the sea. But in this austere room director Jack Furness and his designer Alex Berry skilfully evoke the claustrophobic intensity of extended isolation.
Claire Seymour, Opera Today
Jack Furness's vivid production...
Mark Valencia, WhatsOnStage
Furness and Downie Dear have created a spine-chilling setting for this operatic shaggy dog story.
Amanda Holloway, The Stage
Written on Skin
Melos Sinfonia, LSO St Luke's, October 2017
Deftly directed by Jack Furness...
Richard Morrison, The Times
In the Penal Colony
Shadwell Opera, Arts Theatre, June 2014
The early simplicity of Furness's production is traded in later in the show for some very graphic visuals - all the more shocking for emerging from nowhere... it certainly cuts to the violent heart of Kafka's story; suddenly we're not talking about the idea of torture so much as torture itself, a dramatic sleight-of-hand that's elegantly handled.
Alexandra Coghlan, NewStatesman
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