Nicola Lisle meets the wife and husband duo behind an unconventional operatic company

A couple of nights of opera around a village pond seems an unlikely birthplace for an opera company.

The setting was the Sunningwell Festival in the summer of 2000, and since then Opera Anywhere has burgeoned into a fully-fledged company putting on professional productions around Oxfordshire and beyond.

As the name suggests, Opera Anywhere has always been about doing opera, well, anywhere.

Not just conventional theatres — although they do those too — but also village halls, libraries, shops, railway stations and ice rinks.

They pop up as ‘singing waiters’ at private functions, and last year put on one of their biggest extravaganzas to date — a huge operatic entertainment, complete with a horse and camels, at a private birthday party in the Cotswolds.

The couple behind all this wackiness are husband and wife Mike and Vanessa Woodward, who have an infectious passion for all things operatic.

They met just over 30 years ago in a youth choir in Colchester, and have been singing in perfect harmony ever since.

For Vanessa, who was born in Sunningwell and went to the primary school there, the interest in music and singing started when, as a small girl, she was taken to see the film The Sound of Music.

The interest continued through her school days in Sunningwell and at Fitzharrys School in Abingdon, but in the early days she was drawn to the rock and folk scene.

“I took up the guitar and was a folk singer though my teenage years,” she says.

“I did a lot of music at school and my teachers encouraged me, so I ended up going to music college in Colchester, where I did a foundation course and then a degree course.

“Originally I wasn’t going to study singing — I was going to do trumpet and guitar, and piano was compulsory — but when I went to audition my parents said, ‘Oh, she sings’, so I sang Summertime and ended up being a first study singer and took up classical music.

“At college I loved singing lieder and oratorio, but I hardly did any opera. When I left I went back into folk and rock music, and it was only in later years I got into opera.”

By this time she had met Mike, who took a rather different route into the music business.

“I came from a musical family and was encouraged to play the piano, but that lasted about six weeks because I was too interested in football.

“We always used to have music playing at home, and I was brought up in a Baptist environment so always used to enjoy singing hymns.

“I used to sing those quite lustily and remember getting bullied at school for being too loud in assembly!”

Mike was brought up mainly in North London, but the family travelled around a bit and lived in Oxford for a while.

It was only many years later that he and Vanessa discovered that their parents had some mutual friends, so their paths very nearly crossed as teenagers.

“We both considered Oxford as home and moved back here in the late 80s, so we came full circle!” laughs Vanessa.

The couple moved to Sunningwell in the mid-1990s, and around this time began to get involved with a local amateur opera company.

Mike was also “roped into the village pantomime”, as he puts it, and for many years was the regular pantomime dame. He also gained some valuable experience with Oxford Operatic Society.

From all this eventually grew the idea of founding Opera Anywhere.

“We got a bit frustrated with the local amateur opera company and did a bit of a takeover bid, which backfired!” admits Mike. “So we decided if we wanted to achieve our ambitions we were better off setting up our own company.

“We started off using a mixture of professionals and amateurs, and over the years it’s developed into using young professionals, and that’s where we feel it sits well and balances out.”

Perhaps most successful have been their productions of The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance, which have been touring successfully on and off since 2010.

Such was the success of the company that Mike eventually resigned from his job in IT to devote his time to Opera Anywhere — a very brave move, I suggest to him.

“A lot of people would say it’s really stupid!” he chuckles. “I was in IT for about 25 years, selling software and hardware. But it’s so boring in comparison with anything to do with the theatre. It’s more lucrative, but I felt suppressed. Life’s so short, you have to do what you really want to do.”

So no regrets?

“No regrets,” he says firmly. “I’d like to do it [Opera Anywhere] all again, knowing what I know now, because we’ve learnt a lot in 15 years. But we’re in a great place now, and it’s fantastic.

“We’re now a limited company and a registered charity, so we’ve got a really good board of trustees, who meet regularly. It makes us feel we’re being managed properly and we’re supported as well.”

Looking back over Opera Anywhere’s 15 years, what one thing are they most proud of?

“I think the fact that we’re still growing,” says Mike. “We’ve got a really good, rounded business now, so we’re not reliant on one strand.

“In the old days it was just self-promoted public performances, which are the high-risk parts of what we do, but now we’ve got so many other things that keep us going.”

“Every year there’s a new experience,” adds Vanessa. “We’re often out of our comfort zone, doing slightly wacky things, but that’s good!”

So what are their plans for the future? “Probably Die Fledermaus, and a reduced version of The Magic Flute,” says Mike. “We’ll keep doing the G&S, because Pirates and Mikado suit our quirky approach. So we’re doing new stuff but we’ve got this solid core of repertoire that we rely on. So it’s a balance.”

For more on Opera Anywhere, visit operaanywhere.com