“... this is an overwhelmingly convincing staging of a genuine music drama, and it will surely come to be seen as one of Garsington’s most notable milestones.”
Martin Kettle, The Guardian ★★★★
British stage director Jack Furness is the inaugural Boiler Room Producer at Welsh National Opera, and works regularly with leading houses throughout the UK and Europe. He studied music at Cambridge University, where he founded Shadwell Opera, of which he was Artistic Director until 2025. His work has been described by the Guardian as ‘overwhelmingly convincing’, ‘witty and engaging’, and by the Telegraph as ‘magnificent’.
This season, as well as taking up his post as Boiler Room Producer at Welsh National Opera, he directs the National Opera Studio’s residence at WNO, and returns to the London Handel festival for a revival of Aci by the River, of which his previous direction was described by the Times as full of ‘wit, passion and elegance’.
Recent directing credits include The Importance of Being Earnest (Garsington Opera), Der Fliegender Holländer (Welsh National Opera), Turandot (Royal Opera and Ballet), Hamlet (Buxton International Festival), Hansel and Gretel (Royal Academy of Music), The Queen of Spades (Garsington Opera), Candide (Scottish Opera); Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (London Handel Festival), Faust (Irish National Opera), The Snow Maiden (Royal Northern College of Music), Rusalka (Garsington Opera, Edinburgh International Festival), Don Giovanni (Nevill Holt Opera), Gianni Schicchi (Copenhagen Opera Festival), and Dido and Aeneas (Royal Academy of Music)
For Shadwell Opera, he directed and produced a string of critically-acclaimed works over a 15 year period. Alongside conductor Finnegan Downie Dear, Shadwell commissioned a new opera from Isabella Gellis, The Devil’s Den which he directed in partnership with Opera North at the Howard Assembly Rooms. Other Shadwell productions include 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).
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The Importance of Being Earnest
Garsington Opera, July 2026
'Gerald Barry’s take on Wilde’s comedy is even wittier and zanier in Jack Furness’s hyperactive staging'
Flora Willson, The Guardian
'It’s the most fun anyone’s going to have this season'
'It’s all absolutely smashing. Director Jack Furness and his team have fully embraced the dark Wonderland theme.'
Eleanor Knight, Bachtrack
'Under the guiding hand of Jack Furness, this new production brings out all the surreal joy of Gerald Barry’s operatic adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s celebrated satire.'
'...one can only admire this staging’s level of directorial imagination'
Opera Today
'Rather than step aside, Jack Furness here decides to match Barry blow for blow in a staging that throws a visual riot of bathtubs, cabbages and kangaroos at the audience, refusing to blink first.'
Alexandra Coghlan, Opera Now
'Jack Furness’s staging, abetted by Hannah Wolfe’s zany costumes and Francis O’Connor’s Dalí-like sets — grand piano suspended in mid-air, giant fairground slide snaking down the stage — adds more layers of blissful mayhem and strenuous physical comedy.'
Richard Morrison, The Times
'Garsington Opera’s new production, directed by Jack Furness [...] turns absurdity into a high art and treats irrationality as the norm. {...] Furness’s staging revelled in the disturbing lunacy.'
Fiona Maddocks, The Observer
'The director’s job is to play this for all its worth, and Garsington’s Jack Furness fits the bill.'
Richard Fairman, The Financial Times
The Flying Dutchman
Welsh National Opera, May 2026
'As with all Furness’s work, the staging was rich in ideas and [...] clear in intent.'
Opera Now
'Director Jack Furness brings a new production of The Flying Dutchman to Plymouth with style, passion and simplicity'
Maggie Hooper, The Reviews Hub
'Jack Furness’ staging is founded on visuals that match the emotional grip of Wagner’s score in scenes alternating between absolute stillness and startling vitality.'
George Hall, The Stage
Hamlet
Buxton International Festival, July 2025
"...Furness does gloomy minimalism really well. His dark, psychological staging is stylish without being cluttered, allowing the action to flow. Best of all, Furness trusts the music..."
Mark Pullinger, Bachtrack
The Queen of Spades
Garsington Opera, June 2025
"Jack Furness’s production for Garsington Opera brings rococo spice to a score that throbs with anguish and ardour"
"... Jack Furness’s staging is something of a collector’s item among productions of The Queen of Spades. "
Neil Fisher, The Times
"... this is an overwhelmingly convincing staging of a genuine music drama, and it will surely come to be seen as one of Garsington’s most notable milestones."
Martin Kettle, The Guardian
"Jack Furness directs a terrific new Queen of Spades at Garsington – haunting and harrowing"
Roy Westbrook, Bachtrack
The Queen of Spades
Garsington Opera, May 2025
"Jack Furness’s production for Garsington Opera brings rococo spice to a score that throbs with anguish and ardour"
"... Jack Furness’s staging is something of a collector’s item among productions of The Queen of Spades. "
Neil Fisher, The Times
"... this is an overwhelmingly convincing staging of a genuine music drama, and it will surely come to be seen as one of Garsington’s most notable milestones."
Martin Kettle, The Guardian
"Director Jack Furness elicits convincing portrayals of each character, major and minor, in an opera with many named roles."
Roy Westbrook, Bachtrack
"Striking design and clear concept..."
"Jack Furness’s period-conscious concept ... works beautifully..."
"Furness provides a few telling touches where Tchaikovsky provides imperial divertissement of the highest order..."
David Nice, The Arts Desk
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
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