Theodora, Royal Opera, 31 January 2022

Royal Opera House

Theodora – Julia Bullock
Irene – Joyce DiDonato
Didymus – Jakub Józef Orliński
Septimius – Ed Lyon
Valens – Gyula Orendt
Marcus – Thando Mjandana
Actors and dancers – Aquira Bailey, Browne, Ben Clifford, Sarah Northgraves, David Rawlins, Holly Weston, Kelly Vee

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Harry Bicket (conductor)

Katie Mitchell (director)
Chloe Lamford (set designs)
Sussie Juhlin-Wallén (costumes)
James Farncombe (lighting)
Sarita Piotrowski (movement)

ROH Theodora 2022, (c) Camilla Greenwell

Theodora received its first performances at Covent Garden in 1750. Now, at last, Handel’s oratorio came home, albeit staged—and in a staging Handel, Thomas Morrell, their singers and their audience might have had difficulty in understanding. That qualification is, of course, irrelevant as only a truism can be, for much of we might do would be largely incomprehensible to eighteenth-century London, let alone fourth-century Antioch. The question, as ever, is how performance—which emphatically includes the audience—might mediate between different societies, between different ideologies, between text, act, and critique. 

Katie Mitchell adopts, unsurprisingly, a feminist standpoint. She updates the action to a modern embassy, lorded over by Valens as Roman ambassador (rather than governor), where Christians work as an oppressed class. One of their number, Theodora, is pushed to the extent of attempting and, more controversially, succeeding in destruction of the embassy. That already points to a shift in standpoint, crucially apparent from the opening. We should normally wait until the third scene before seeing (hearing) Theodora or indeed the Christians more generally, the first two scenes being devoted to Valens, Didymus, Septimius, and the Chorus of Heathens. Here, we see Theodora and her people from the start, in the kitchen (traditionally, the female ‘domestic’ sphere, of course, ‘top chefs’ notwithstanding). When we view and hear the Romans, it is through their eyes and ears as much as our own. That continues to be the case when Theodora has been sent to the brothel (the other side of the main public room from the kitchen) as a sex slave and continues, moreover, to be the case for Didymus when they have exchanged clothes, when he takes his first, literally faltering steps in heels to learn what it might be to view the world as a woman, and to be treated by that world as a woman. He experiences female solidarity with fellow sex workers, as had Theodora. They teach him how he might survive, by pole-dancing.

 

Yet we also remain wise to what continues to divide them; there is far more to womanhood than clothes and a blonde wig. For where Mitchell’s achievement hits home most powerfully, often shockingly so, is in its unflinching portrayal of violence against women, Theodora humiliated, molested, ‘remade’ in an appearance acceptable to those in power, and awaiting rape. Septimius may speak of Theodora as a ‘prostitute’, but she is not that; there is no payment. She is entirely at the mercy of those who possess her—until, that is, she fights back. Mitchell’s determination to avoid, to demolish, the male gaze is meet and right. Indeed, in having Didymus stand as the object of our gaze, male and female, first in the baptismal rite conducted at the end of the first act, renewed and parodied in the second loss of his clothes (his masculinity too), she reminds us that even such fragile ‘equality’ as that will constantly be under attack. We recognise it as inversion, even if we pleasure in it. And should we not instead wish for and bring about liberation instead? 

Whereas the libretto has us move in our mind’s imagination from one camp to the other, the embassy setting enables exchange, sometimes by splitting the stage into different rooms, sometimes by having their worlds collide. This has evident dramatic consequences, but they can be arrestingly aesthetic too. In Irene’s ‘Defend her, Heav’n!’ for instance, the action taking place simultaneously in the brothel is seen in magnificently crafted slow motion (movement: Sarita Piotrowski) that interacts with vocal and orchestral music in astonishing fashion. Mitchell appreciates the difficulties attendant to staging in ‘modern’ fashion arias which, if even if they had been intended to be staged—we need not be too hung up on that, for Handel would have written them similarly, even identically—would not generally have been conceived as purveyors of dramatic action. Here, and on certain other occasions, she lets the world continue to move. How, after all, could she stop it? Yet there is a suspended quality to that action, a recognition that beholding it can be exquisite, can be spellbinding, and can be harnessed, dare I suggest, to good and evil.

 

Harry Bicket’s conducting of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House—in a welcome break with much recent practice, the Royal Opera has not consigned Handel’s music to an imported band—impressed most when, as often it did, it appeared quite indivisible from the stage action. I had a sense—right or wrong, it barely matters—that he might have done it differently in a performance without Mitchell’s staging. At times, more often than not with the chorus, it took a little while to settle down; indeed, some of the faster choral writing, arguably too fast on this occasion, ran a little ragged. This, however, was by and large a thoughtful and compelling musical performance, with some utterly ravishing woodwind playing in particular. And what a joy not to have to endure Handel with toothpaste-squeezing strings!

 

What a joy, moreover, to be treated to such a cast of Handel singers, who of course contributed greatly to much of what I have said above. Julia Bullock’s patient strength and unshowy sincerity seemed to me just the ticket for Theodora. Charles Burney described her predecessor, Giulia Frasi, a few years earlier as having for Handel ‘a clear and sweet voice, free from defects, and a smooth and chaste style of singing; which, though cold and unimpassioned, pleased natural ears, and escaped the censure of critics.’ Doubtless that meant something different then from what it would now, but I sensed, however fancifully, a dialogue between our two Theodoras, in the broader spirit of what we saw and heard elsewhere too. If I felt the production a little less clear what to do with Irene—perhaps I was simply failing to understand—Joyce DiDonato’s performance of heartfelt clarity likewise challenged one to imagine it sung otherwise. Likewise Jakub Józef Orliński’s Didymus, as athletic and as melting as his stage presence. Movingly, intelligently compromised as a character between worlds, Ed Lyon’s Septimius was again an object lesson in vocal style, clarity, and tenderness. If Gyula Orendt’s task as Valens in this production was rather thankless, he emerged nonetheless with vocal and dramatic credit. Dramatic credit certainly went to the non-singing actors in the cast too, crucial to Mitchell’s vision—and to our increasingly discomfited gaze.

 

I have a ‘but’. (Does not one always?) I can see why Mitchell and her team resist Theodora’s martyrdom. In many ways, I sympathise, though surely we have all moved beyond Cathérine Clément’s notorious Opera, or the Undoing of Women (notorious not least for treating opera as if it were not a musical genre). Yet ultimately, to have the heroine survive and kill her oppressors points to a lack of interest I find more troubling than any inversion or deconstruction; it is a lack of interest shared by most opera directors and indeed by most beyond our theatres too. For Theodora is supposed to be a Christian in more than name. Didymus is supposed to convert in more than word. Who are these ‘Christians’? One could adopt a Nietzschean attitude towards their ‘slave morality’ if one did not want to take their faith, or Handel’s, at face value. One could make them another oppressed group: Muslims, say. There is surely, though, interest in that for which they are willing, even joyful, to die; to lose that completely seems an unnecessarily bitter pill. Religious belief and a broader theological framework seem neither here nor there, which surely is to sidestep why Theodora ‘should’ have died and to fail to recognise her on terms more radical still than anything attempted here and which ultimately resist victimhood more strongly too. That, of course, is not what Mitchell has chosen and she is perfectly entitled to have made the choice she has, but it is surely not incompatible with feminism (at least as this male voice understands it). We are nevertheless left with much to consider.

Festival d'Aix-en-Provence (1) - The Rake's Progress, 11 July 2017

Théâtre de l’Archevêché

Actors, Chorus, Mother Goose (Hilary Summers), Tom Rakewell (Paul Appleby), Nick Shadow (Kyle Ketelsen)
Images: © Patrick Berger / artcompress

Ann Trulove – Julia Bullock

Tom Rakewell – Paul Appleby

Nick Shadow – Kyle Ketelsen

Nick Shadow 2, The Keeper of the Asylum – Evan Hughes

Trulove – David Pittsinger

Mother Goose – Hilary Summers

Baba the Turk – Andrew Watts

Sellem – Alan Oke

Actors – Antony Antunes, Kirsty Arnold, Nichole Bird, Karl Fagerlund Brekke, Andrew Gardiner, Chihiro Kawasaki, Maxime Nourissat, Jami Reid-Quarrell, Gabriella Schmidt, Clemmie Sveaas

Simon McBurney (director)

Gerard McBurney (dramaturgy)

Michael Levine (designs)

Christina Cunningham (costumes)

Paul Anderson (lighting)

Will Duke (video)

Leah Hausman (choreography, design assistance)

English Voices (chorus master: Tim Brown)

Orchestre de Paris

Eivind Gullberg Jensen (conductor)

Auction guests, Baba the Turk (Andrew Watts) and Tom 

I thought it was longer than it had been since my most recent Rake’s Progress. When I checked, I discovered that had only been a couple of years or so ago, at the Royal Academy: and very good it was too. Nevertheless, this new Aix production from Simon McBurney proves mightily refreshing. It has something in common with the RAM staging (John Ramster) in that it concentrated on the opera as an opera, rather than the debates surrounding it – although those can surely never be far away from most of our experience, whatever Stravinsky, with typical disingenuousness, might have suggested. But the emphasis and the illumination are different, which is surely just as it should be.

London stands at the heart of this Rake. Not, thank God, in a particularist sort of way: that would be especially absurd for a staging in Provence. This is not only the city of Hogarth, but also the city that was, for all its flaws, indeed in many ways on account of them, until recently the greatest in the world. It destroyed itself in part, of course; ‘its’ greed, both in the eighteenth century and under neoliberalism, rightly provokes revulsion, none greater than that of those who live or have lived there and are not members of the ‘banking community’ and other such delightful trades. But for those of us estranged from our country at the moment, Theresa May’s ‘citizens of nowhere’, we know who really did it. We are also able to recognise our city with all the delicious agony of an exile, internal or external, in what we see before us, without collapse into the merely didactic. For the great, indeed diabolical con trick that is capitalism, whether neoliberal or in an early mutation, is in large part the parable here; it always was, whatever Stravinsky or even Auden might have told us. (Repeat after me. Intention is not everything; sometimes it is very little at all.) When Tom goes to London, he goes to the City; he goes to one of those plush, joyless, ‘pleasurable’ towers, from which one may see other towers. He has well-dressed, superficially attractive – very attractive – people fawn over him, change his clothes, transform him into one of them. He is – and this would hit home as strongly as I have ever known it do – ‘weak’, as Ann tells us. Christina Cunningham’s costumes are a profoundly important – and knowingly shallow – contributor to the drama; they make us envious, even complicit, wishing or at least in danger of wishing we were part of the tragedy we know this pleasure garden to be.

Nick, Tom, and images of Baba

When Mother Goose’s establishment comes into view, the emphasis shifts to eroticism that is both blatant and subtle. Again, most of us probably want it, although we know we should not. A subtle orgy might seem a contradiction in terms, at least to those of us on the outside of this world, but Leah Hausman’s choreography really does its work here. Far more is suggested than actually depicted; our minds, our imaginations are made to do the dirty work. Pornography, the pornography of late capitalism, is thus dramatised and accused. I could not help but think of Antonio Negri’s Constitution of Time. In all the pleasure, the beauty of the young bodies, there is of course neutralisation too. Everything becomes the same; it does not matter whom one chooses, whom one adds to one’s iPhone collection. And so, after Tom has taken his pictures – displayed to the world, as they would be, although in this case on the walls of the set – of his final nubile companion of the evening, Nick Shadow, the capitalist Devil himself, shows him pictures of Baba the Turk. The rest you know – save for the twist here that Baba is now played by a counter-tenor. Her whole life is performance, an act, of course, and this takes its place in her line of publicity strategies. There is no especial jolt to our – or at least to my – understanding; that, I suspect, is part of the point. The auction is full of typical metropolitan ‘style’, that of the empty, expensive sort in which the drama has been mired all along: Mayfair, not Whitechapel.

On the other side, however, Ann seems, and I think probably is, more present than ever. She sometimes, earlier on, walks past. Tom appears to see her, but does he? And would what that even mean if he did? She is good, a symbol of goodness, but she is not just that; I felt her more as a character than I can remember doing so before. That is partly a matter of Julia Bullock’s tremendous performance, touchingly pure, and with every word readily audible (far from always the case in this role). But it is partly McBurney’s conception too. She is, perhaps, a social critic too, no mere inegénue. There is indeed, as McBurney suggests in a brief programme interview, ‘dans une certaine mesure une figure révolutionnaire’ to be perceived there too. Baba knows that, it seems. She has her own roles to play, but she is convinced by Ann, and actually sends her on her way to attempt, however vainly, redemption.

Ann Trulove (Julia Bullock) with auction guests behind

Before that, moreover, Ann walks through a typical Tube subway, cleverly conjured up with design technology: a bit of that South Kensington pedestrian tunnel to it, actually, although more ‘desolate’, ‘poorer’, to the non-London, or con-comprehending, eye. That actually means more alive, of course; the homeless people and the busker – playing solo trumpet, in a nice touch – are, for us Londoners, for us human beings, the real story, the real tragedy. And in a final, potentially Foucouldian twist, the man running the show in Bedlam is Nick Shadow’s shadow. Madness has of course always been a way to deal with criticism. Had Tom perhaps an inkling of what was going on; or might, at the very least, Ann have helped him enlighten him had he not fallen ‘mad’? The voices in his head are the voices we hear all around us: ‘unelectable’, ‘sensible’, ‘moderate’, and so forth? They are the voices that will do all they can to prevent us make London, not what it was, but what it should have been, could have been, all along – and in many ways still is.

I almost – almost – believed, then, in the ‘love story’ that comes almost sentimentally to the foreground of work and production alike. Bullock played her part in that, of course. So did Paul Appleby’s lovable, lovably weak Tom: the sort of character one knows one should distrust, and yet desperately wishes to do otherwise. He never seemed quite the author of his own actions; which amongst us is, whilst Nick is at play? More than that, though, his sappy tenor proved just as sympathetic and manipulative as Bullock’s crystal-clear soprano. Kyle Ketelsen’s Nick was every bit as persuasive as he should be – and more so. He was reassuringly ‘normal’, ‘as things are’, until one really looked and listened: just like capital itself, and with all the dangerous, often surprisingly understated, attraction it exerts. Evan Hughes proved an excellent shadow to the shadow: the same, and yet different. A more real ‘normality’ was offered by David Pittsinger’s splendidly sane Trulove; or is Trulove just a better actor, the voice of old-school conservatism? Hilary Summers made for a fantastic Mother Goose: ruler of her own world, not least vocally, and with a splendidly naughty sense of genuine fun. Is she not a ‘revolutionary’ in her way, too? Or are we just meant to think so? Andrew Watts made much of Baba’s staginess; how could he not? But there was definitely a human heart beating strongly there; the appeal to her fans is far from entirely to be dismissed. Alan Oke’s Sellem imparted a fine sense of slightly camp insidiousness: all the better to sell Tom’s goods with. 

The graveyard scene

There was a ruthless dryness to much, not all, of Eivind Gullberg Jensen’s conducting which was not only echt neo-classical Stravinsky, but very much of the dramatic idea. The orchestra, both unlike and not unlike Wagner, was telling us something. A delight in contrivance, moreover, fused perfectly with the score’s well-nigh miraculous forging of continuity out of what ‘should’ merely stop and start. Stravinsky’s cellular method here is, in many ways, not so very different either from his late serial masterpieces or, dare I suggest it, The Rite of Spring. The miracle is his – and, in a way, that of capital too. If the Orchestre de Paris had its soloistic moments and was for the most part commendably sharp of rhythm. If there was certainly nothing wrong with its performance, though, there was perhaps a slight lack of presence, even of commitment, that slightly detracted from the musico-dramatic whole. Maybe it was as much an acoustical matter as anything else: outdoor performances, notoriously, take a good deal of getting used to. There was certainly no such fault to be found with the singers of English Voices, all of whom played their individually directed performances to a tee. They, like the rest of us, were both enthralled and ultimately destroyed by the game afoot.

The Indian Queen, English National Opera, 26 February 2015

Coliseum

Hunahpú – Vince Yi

Teculihuatzin – Julia Bullock
Doña Isabel – Lucy Crowe
Don Pedrarias Dávila – Thomas Walker
Don Pedro de Alvarado – Noah Stewart
Ixbalanqué – Anthony Roth Costanzo
Mayan Shaman, Zapatista – Luthando Qave
Leonor – Maritxell Carrero
Mayan Deities (dancers) – Sonya Cullingford, Alistair Goldsmith, Lucy Starkey, Jack Thomson
Tecum Umán – Jack Thomson
Leonor as child – Rosanna Beacock

Peter Sellars (director)

Gronk (set designs)
Dunya Ramicova (costumes)
James F. Ingalls (lighting)
Christopher Williams (choreography)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Christopher Bucknall)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Laurence Cummings (conductor)

As Peter Sellars might enjoin us, ‘Hey, let’s accentuate the positive!’ Or, as his relentlessly hyper-ventilating character, Leonor, might loquaciously, nonsensically have put it, ‘Throbbing through the long, hot, dangerous night, he, o he, that wondrous mixture of virility and divinity, ah, how the thrusting of his white, masculine loins and my ever-flowing beauteous womanhood must maximise and conjoin all that is awesomely towering and breathtakingly divine in river-creating accentuation of the, o, how ecstatic, the majestically positive.’

I had better start again: let us attend to the virtues of this performance. They were entirely musical, and in many cases, estimable indeed. Much to my surprise, after his dry, charmless Messiah for ENO, Laurence Cummings conducted an often richly expressive account of Purcell’s music. There was even, wonder of wonders in this puritanical age, vibrato – more, admittedly would have been welcome – to be heard from the violins. A decent-sized orchestra and well-endowed – sorry, Leonor – continuo group gave as fine a ‘live’ account as I can recall of much of the composer’s greatest music, its chromaticism beguiling and disconcerting in equal measure. The occasional ill-chosen tempo aside – an absurdly rushed Trumpet Tune, if I remember correctly – the music took its time, its melancholy and, on occasion, languor permitted to tell. I am not sure, moreover, that I have heard more committed choral singing of Purcell’s sacred music – what it was doing there is of course another matter – than that from the ENO Chorus, its expressive range pleasingly unconstrained by ‘early musicke’ dogma.

Much of the solo singing was very good indeed too. Lucy Crowe’s soprano brought welcome lyricism, elegance of line, and emotional depth, contrasting with the lighter, yet not slighter contributions of Julia Bullock. The two counter-tenors were more variable.  Vince Yi was accurate, and rather more than that on some occasions, but his voice, especially in its higher reaches, was somewhat thin of tone. Anthony Roth Costanzo struggled with intonation and register earlier on – almost as if he were expecting the music to be sung at a different pitch – but revealed himself later to be the more expressively-voiced of the two. Noah Stewart’s virile yet sensitive – yes, Leonor – tenor had one wishing for more. (We heard nothing at all from him in the first half, although we saw plenty.) I hope that ENO will invite him back for a more musically substantial role. Likewise Thomas Walker, whose stylish contributions were not the least of the evening’s virtues. Luthando Qave was a little woolly of tone.

Had we been treated to a concert of Purcell’s music, that would have been all well and good. Alas, we had Peter Sellars’s intervention to contend with. The programme description ‘unfinished semi-opera in five acts with a prologue by Henry Purcell, completed by Peter Sellars’ was, at least in one way, uncharacteristically modest; for what we had was, the ‘soundtrack’ notwithstanding, entirely the baleful creation of Sellars’s half-baked ‘ideas’. Doubtless they would have been thought daringly post-colonial, and will be praised as such by fashion victims; yet, in truth, there was little of the ‘post-’ to them. There are problems, to put it mildly, with the twenty-first century presentation of Purcellian semi-opera, but I cannot imagine that we could have been worse off with something approximating to the original play, described by Sellars as a ‘bizarre fantasy’. It takes one to know one, I suppose. I can only assume that the spoken texts from Rosario Aguilar’s The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma became more thoroughly lost in translation. What we hear seems in its banality to cater to the lower end of the Woman’s Own market, an irredeemable mixture of very mild soft pornography and tedious 'right-on' platitudes.

Sellars seems to present, although I may have misunderstood, an unthinking mixture of Aztec and Mayan civilisation conquered by the Spanish. The patronising presentation of the ‘Other’ as primitive victims strains toward, never quite reaching, the intellectual coherence and emotional depth of a gap-year student’s attempts to find him- or herself. Of what might interest us about other civilisations there is little, unless one counts a risibly choreographed parody of Mayan mysticism at the beginning, replete, I am sorry to say, with recorded generic ‘jungle’ sounds. There is still less to credit in the gaudy, jumble-sale-style costumes. ‘Foreign’ people are so colourful, and unspoilt, you see. Designs, attractive enough in a one-dimensional, touristic sort of way, are by ‘Gronk’, who ‘since the early 1970s has been using guerrilla street performance, video, film, photography and conceptual art to upstage the mainstream art world and proclaim the outside existentialism of Chicana/or artists.’ At least we are spared the participation of Bill Viola, although we are certainly not spared the ardours of a preposterously long evening: three hours and forty minutes, with one interval. It seems much longer, especially during the second of the two acts, despite its slightly greater dramatic coherence.

Then there is Leonor – who, for the most part, confusingly appears to speak as her mother, Teculihuatzin, lover to Don Pedro (Leonor’s father). It would, I hope, be difficult to find anyone in polite society who would not be utterly horrified by the genocidal acts of the Spanish conquerors. So banal and excitable are Leonor’s interventions, though, that one almost begins to sympathise. Were the squaddies to put her out of our misery, it would unquestionably be a merciful release. I do not know whether the actress, Maritxell Carrero, was simply following orders. However, even if one could overlook the aggravating mispronunciation of words such as ‘lieutenant’, she came across as something close to an ‘amusing’ 1970s caricature of an ‘exotic foreigner’. Perhaps, however, such caricatured North American presentation is creditably true to this Indian Queen, for ultimately, so self-indulgent a show seems concerned with little beyond a director’s self-imposition upon self-righteously adopted ‘causes’. If ‘self’ appears too many times in the preceding sentence, that sorry deed, at least, has not been carried out entirely unknowingly.