MAKE a date in your diary for one of the best and biggest cultural events to come to the South West this year.

The acclaimed Garsington Opera will broadcast Eugene Onegin on the big screen in Apex Park in Highbridge.

This free event provides an opera classic up close and personal. Take the family and a picnic and enjoy one of the world’s greatest love stories set to Tchaikovsky’s beautiful music.

The heartbreaking story of passion and romance tells the tragic story of Tatyana, a bookish country girl, who yearns for more than the compromise and routine of provincial family life.

Hoping she has met her true fate in Onegin, a brilliant and glamorous society bachelor visiting from Moscow, she pours out her love for him in an impulsive and passionate letter, setting off an inexorable and tragic chain of events.

Based on Alexander Pushkin’s great verse novel of the same name, Tchaikovsky’s best-loved opera gives exquisite voice to the casualties of love, the victims in the battle between raw emotion and social convention. Tchaikovsky’s own pain, frustration and loss find expression here in some of his most haunting and beautiful music.

Enjoy Garsington Opera’s free outdoor relay, in which former RSC director, Michael Boyd brings Tchaikovsky’s fateful romance to life with designs by Tom Piper bring Tchaikovsky’s fateful romance to life, with Roderick Williams and Natalya Romaniw making their role debuts and Douglas Boyd conducting.

This will be a relaxed performance with community performances and street theatre.

Sung in Russian with English subtitles

There's the opportunity to get involved in practical sessions, learn new skills in your summer holiday, or simply relax with a picnic in the park to watch one of the most heart wrenching tales in opera played out on the big screen.

Leading up to the festival screening on Saturday 20 August in Apex Park artists from Opera for All will be leading a series of have a go workshops for families, and a theatre skills session for young people. Sessions will be hosted locally at the McMillan Theatre in Bridgwater.

For full details and times, contact 0117 403 3634 or go to: www.garsingtonopera.org