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Desert island opera London
Coliseum
11/29/1999 - and 1, 4, 6, 9, 11 December 1999, 17, 19, 22, 27 January 2000
George Frideric Handel Alcina
Joan Rodgers (Alcina), Lisa Milne (Morgana), Sarah Connolly (Ruggiero),
Christine Rice (Bradamante), Mark Richardson (Melisso), Toby Spence
(Oronte), Gail Pearson (Oronte)
Charles Mackerras (conductor)
David McVicar (director) Alcina's isle is often identified as Japan, or somewhere in the Caribbean,
one of the places that once promised a new world of wealth, exoticism and
freedom from convention and duty. Ruggiero, imprisoned there by desire for
Alcina, has to agree to be rescued by his warrior-fiancée Bradamante
in order to found the house of Este and ensure that the Renaissance
happens. His choice is essentially between pleasure and duty, or
emasculating sex and heroic manhood embodied by his future wife, who is
dressed as a man almost throughout.
The real action is the progress of Ruggiero's awareness of his enslavement
and delusion, and of the fallibility of desire. But Handel's music
expresses and externalizes the emotions and striving of all the characters
in an drama that takes place, not in Bermuda or Ruggiero's mind, but
literally in the theatre, the magic space where we in the audience indulgue
our imaginary desires.
In David McVicar's visually beautiful and sympathetic production, the isle
is itself the theatre, and the transformed animals the audience ensnared by
the desire for spectacle and musical pleasure. The audience, dressed in
white, take their seats at the back of an empty black stage, to be hidden
by the facade of a bronzed theatre as Bradamante enters at the start and
the fiction begins. Melisso, the representative of reason, is always exempt
from the illusion -- he can retreat to golden-lit study full of books
downstage left, which has an early-model ECT machine to disenchant Ruggiero
and extends across the stage in the last act as reason takes over.
All the other characters, including an exotic set of dancers, appear and
act in ultra-baroque eighteenth-century theatrical style. Alcina is a
theatrical leading lady, ending up in a splendid, massively hooped purple
gown, Morgana (here more a good-hearted slapper than the usual bimbo) a
showgirl, in lurid pink and then in a tuxedo, and Oronte an exotic general
in a sarong. Ruggiero starts off in flowing underwear, gets into a frock at
one point (as well as being shaved in the style of kd lang) and ends up,
like Bradamante, dressed as a redcoat, a symbol of imposed order at home as
well as in the new world. There is plenty more cross-dressing in the chorus
and dancers, but it is about pleasure and pure fun, not transgression,
except in the way a principal boy and panto dame are transgressive.
The concept works fine, but McVicar really triumphs by staging the scenes
for what they are, using externalized effects only to overcode and clarify
the emotions involved. An amazing amount of the time the singers seem
simply to stand and deliver (in Amanda Holden's lucid rhyming English
translation), or walk about, working out the drama within the music
accompanied only by conventional gestures. Some arias are accompanied by
dances: Oronte's denunciation of women had a trio of fluttering, flighty
dancers, and Morgana's first act finale had a full song'n'dance routine to
reflect her exuberance in her (mistaken) belief that the disguised
Bradamante loves her. But almost every scene was applauded on the opening
night, because every staging delivered exactly what the scene was about.
The snow-fall as Alcina realises she is in danger of losing Ruggiero was
extremely effective and moving.
McVicar took hints from Nicholas Hynter's Xerxes and Christopher
Alden's Ariodante, as well as Graham Vick's Fairy queen,
though the overall result was completely integrated and original. As well
as the suggestion of an ENO house style, there was another sign that the
enchanted isle is the Coliseum in particular. This production is absolutely
perfectly cast from ENO company singers and house regulars.
Sarah Connolly started off understatedly as the post-coital Ruggiero, and
warmed up superbly to a wistful Me lusigna and a hearbroken Verdi prati,
before blowing the sea-monsters away with Sta in hircania. Christine Rice
as Bradamante sang fluidly in a beautiful low mezzo, not pushing the gender
envelope at all but enchanting and more heroic than Ruggiero. Lisa Milne
sang spectacularly as Morgana, her music adding a magical glow to her
cheerful randiness. Joan Rodgers was a dark-tinged Alcina, not only beacuse
of her copper wig and dark dresses, but in the intensity of her singing.
Her two scenas in act two (mourning and then anger) were completely
engaging. Gail Pearson was charming as the cuttable but emotionally
essential Oberto (who else loves anyone straightforwardly?).
Mark Richardson, an old pro, was a benign Melisso, and Toby Spence, who
also has a beautiful voice, a young and petulant Oronte who was always
going to turn out all right.
Charles Mackerras directed the ENO orchestra in delightful style. The
performance lasted four hours, including two intervals, but few of the
audience would have missed any of it.
Incidentally, the facade in the set must have been that of John Gay's
Covent Garden theatre where Alcina was first performed. Which,
amazingly, is on the site of the Royal Opera House, about to re-open. The
ENO seems to have staged a Covent Garden triumph just as Covent Garden
re-opens. Pure coincidence, of course. Nothing to do with rival opera
houses -- that only happened in Handel's time.
H.E. Elsom
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