Walking through post-storm rain puddles and rush hour traffic en route to the Theatre Royal on a Monday evening seemed a far cry from being on a balmy canal-side stroll to the Opera in mid-seventeenth century Venice. But once inside the warmth of the auditorium, there quickly followed a transformation of sensibilities and spirit.
From the cheeky opening play-off between Fortune, Virtue and Love, which Love assuredly wins, we are in the divine grip of an exquisite performance by the English Touring Opera company. On the menu tonight, the power of love: to unite; to divide; to ruin; to ridicule and to drown in. And gently prompting this stylish and emotional turmoil, the gentle and beautifully balanced orchestration of Monteverdi, played to perfection here by the Old Street Band.
And so we were off, from the sweetest of expressed tones from a longing Ottone returning from war to his lover Poppea, only to find that things have ‘moved on’. She has set her sights higher, much higher, in his absence, and casts him aside – he just the first to feel the sting of unrequited love in this steamy story.
Designer Samal Blak sets this tableau in a Stalinist Russian style, Nerone as the despot of course, strutting in Soviet uniform, Seneca his philosopher and tutor in peasant garb. The action takes place very effectively on a simple two-tiered stage with moveable walls that advance or retreat to accentuate spacial tensions.
As it was, this superb cast could have been in swimming costumes and still managed to pull off a triumph, such was the quality of the singing by all of them. There was strength in every performance. Helen Sherman played the self-centred, vain and lustful Nerone to great effect, Piotr Lempa’s Seneca delivered delicious rumbling bass notes, Poppea herself portrayed a swoon of romantic and sexual hunger with absolute passion, and there were other exceptional passages from Cathrine Kirkman standing in as Drusilla on the night, and John-Colyn Gyeantey, as Arnalta, Poppea’s nurse – none more so than in an exultant and witty celebration of her mistress’s final triumph at the demise of the superb Ottavia (Hannah Pedley), whose own solo of eviscaration, when bound to oblivion is another key moment of the night.
But Monteverdi leaves best to last. An intoxicating duet between Nerone and Poppea sung in canon leaves us in no doubt that Love takes all, if only fleetingly. As the unrestrained lovers embrace each other, the shadowy victims of this affair gather and peer through a glass window above, to observe a prize poignantly beyond their reach.
Simon Bishop
