Last week Opera (see Mozart Rusticana); this week Flamenco in, of all unlikely places, the Georgian Assembly Rooms in Ludlow which still function as the town’s entertainment centre.

I’ve always been attracted to the musical subtleties and sheer physicality of flamenco music and dance and I have regularly promised myself a short sojourn in Seville, to be spent in small, smoky bars where guttural singing and harsh guitar chords echo off low vaulted ceilings – a promise which I have so far failed to keep. With a strongly held view that raw peasant culture like this doesn’t export easily, I had doubts that this powerful musical form would convince when performed on the stage of a provincial English theatre.

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