Theodora at the ROH review – a triumphant revival of Handel’s masterpiece
Percy Grainger wrote his light orchestral bonne bouche, Handel in the Strand, in 1911. The early 20th-century composer was tipping his hat to the 18th-century maestro who had made London his stomping ground, and the theatres around The Strand and Haymarket his marketplace.
Now The Royal Opera House has revived Handel’s Theodora, premiered as an oratorio in 1749 and presented in a stunning production from the director, Katie Mitchell, as a modern cinema verité blockbuster.
Tarantino, eat your heart out. Blood and guts abound. Guns, gags, wounds. Rome has become a sleazy, mobster’s hotel. The persecuted Christians are kitchen staff. Valens, a Roman Ambassador, is now capo di tutti capi. Didymus, Valen’s enforcer and the Christian, Theodora’s lover, is a conflicted gangster. To put it mildly.
Irene — never a convincing Roman name, adapted from the Greek God of Peace, Eirene — is head chef and bottle washer. She is sung by Joyce DiDonato, at the top of her blinding form and with a role equivalent to the heroine, Theodora, sung by soprano Julia Bullock.
DiDonato has performed her usual trick of becoming “Irene”. Her commitment to the role is a wonder to behold. She is never still. Even when on the margins of the action – perhaps in the kitchen behind a stove or stacking plates – she is facially mobile, reacting to the main action elsewhere on stage.
She also, let’s get this out of the way early, delivered the most sublime a cappella cadenza during her Act II aria praying for God’s protection, that has ever been heard on that Covent Garden stage. Conductor Harry Bicket simply lowered his baton as she embarked on a jewel of improvisation and let her get on with it.
As her mezzo voice ranged from threatening low growls to a tender, wispy upper register that faded to nothing, the silence engulfing the 2,300 sell-out audience was thick.
Bicket seemed to have to remind himself to pick up his baton, signal his orchestra and move on. We were all mesmerised. The plot is straightforward.
Act I – We are in Rome when Christians were still Catomeat for lions. Valens announces a public sacrifice to Jove. Loyalty test. Those who refuse to honour the Roman God, principally the Christian Theodora, at whom the test is aimed, will be executed. Didymus asks Valens to relent and is accused of disloyalty.
Theodora and Irene are hard at work in the kitchen, plotting to destroy the Roman embassy. They are handling explosives, timers and wirey-paraphernalia on the steel worksurface – preparing a bombe surprise en croute for Valens’ entrée.
Enter Septimus, Didymus’ sidekick, sung by Ed Lyon, to arrest them and announce a dread punishment. Theodora will be recruited to the Temple of Venus as a sex worker for Roman soldiers.
Here it’s a plush dark red nightclub complete with two dance poles. Yes, there are gyrating pole dance extras. Didymus arrives too late to intervene and pledges to rescue Theodora.
Act II – Valens sends Septimus to Theodora with a message that, if she abandons the Christian Party, cross the floor of the House and join the Roman Party, withdraw her letter of no confidence in Valens’ leadership and apologise for her unfounded accusation that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, she will be welcomed back into the kitchen.
It all goes to show that tragic political farce is fated to repeat itself and is alive and well in that other opera house down the road, Number 10.
Didymus turns up. Theodora says she’d rather kill herself than pole dance for Romans. They swap clothes, and Theodora escapes through an open rear window into Horse Guards Parade – sorry! the forum. Irene leads a vigil with the other Christian kitchen staff, in breach of Valens’ vaunted vigil ban.
Act III – As Irene and the Christians celebrate Theodora’s safe return, news comes that Didymus has, not surprisingly, been sentenced to death. Theodora insists on offering herself in place of Didymus. In this production, the couple is locked in a freezer with hanging cattle carcasses. Irene intervenes and they go to their deaths singing a Christian paeon to their immortality.
French soprano Sandrine Piau describes Handel’s writing as a caress, compared with the writing of other Baroque composers. “Three Rameau’s and I’m done. Even after eleven, Handel’s I could go on forever.”
The caressing is in full flood in Theodora. The music is sublime. The oratorio saw the light of day in an era when sentimental heroines were de rigueure. Clarissa Harlowe had died in December 1748. Vapours all round.
Who was she? She wasn’t real. The main character in Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel.
Ladies of quality of the day, Lady Bradsheigh, Mary Delany and Susanna Highmore were “as unhappy as if it were all true”. Into this high-octane Clarissa-mania librettist Thomas Morrell introduced the Theodora concept, based on a religious novel by “the father of chemistry” Robert Boyle, Love and Religion demonstrated in the Martyrdom of Theodora and Didymus. Boy, they loved snappy titles back in 1687.
The conundrum for Katie Mitchell and set designer Chloe Lamford was, how to bring the sentimental thriller into the 21st century while keeping faith with the original story.
They have succeeded triumphantly. The set slides right and left, revealing a fully equipped working kitchen, a dowdy banqueting space worthy of any mushroom decorated West End hotel chain, a red-plush nightclub/brothel and dingy connecting corridors.
In a stroke of genius, some of the action takes place in perfectly coordinated slow motion, which suits the pace of the score and lends a surreal quality to events. The escape from the cold store to immortality in the final scene gathers poignancy from its modulated pace.
Harry Bicket is an exceptional conductor of Baroque music. He came to attention waving his baton in Glyndebourne’s 1996 Theodora and clearly relished the opportunity to reacquaint himself with his Christian heroine in Covent Garden.
American soprano, Julia Bullock, brings a calm authority to the role of Theodora. She has a stage presence to match her impressive voice and has worked with Mitchell before.
In 2019, she joined pianist Cédric Tiberghien under Mitchell’s direction for the American, British, Belgian and Russian premieres of Zauberland (“Magic Land”), a new work juxtaposing Schumann’s Dichterliebe with original songs by composer Bernard Foccroulle and Martin Crimp, the “in-yer-face” British playwright.
Covent Garden is on something of a Baroque spree. Alongside Theodora, in the Linbury theatre comes Vivaldi’s Bajazet, courtesy of Irish National Opera. A three-act opera, a pasticcio, meaning much of the music was stolen from other composers – this was pre copyright – it is a brutal love spat over a heroine, Irene. She’s everywhere these days.
Both Theodora and Bajazet are playing to full houses. Baroque is back. In contrast to the New York Met where I have counted recent audiences to be in the 20 per cent territory. Last Friday La Bohème at the ENO’s Coliseum was another sell-out.
Small wonder that this revival of a forgotten Handel masterpiece had them banging on Covent Garden’s door for entry. The doughty impresario would be thrilled to see his political drama brought back with startling relevance to audiences almost three hundred years after he strutted his original stuff on London’s Strand.