ENO’s Rodelinda: near-perfect singing, perfectly gimmicky direction

I wasn’t going to write about Handel’s Rodelinda, wasn’t even intending to go, but thanks to the kindness of the press office at ENO I did, and it was so marvellous that I can’t resist expressing my delight. Not that it was ideal — no production of Rodelinda is, or, I’m beginning to suspect, can be. The musical side of things, actually, was close to perfect, but Richard Jones seemed to be in several minds about what kind of work it is, and indulged in an orgy of director’s gimmicks, gleefully abetted by the set designer Jeremy Herbert. Set in fascist Milan, the show was redolent of Glyndebourne’s 1998 production, which took its inspiration from silent movies in the exaggerated posturing of its heroes and, especially, villains. At ENO we have a set of two rooms, one occupied by the baddies, then across a narrow corridor — plenty of doors to slam and reappear through — the intensively surveyed room where they keep their prisoners. Other sets appear, including an imposing fascist monument to the presumed-dead hero Bertarido, and extra storeys, but the original returns.

The question for the director to settle is: how seriously are we to take this drama, which does end happily, with all but the most disgusting villain rejoicing, the good rewarded, the evil converted? But that, it seems to me, is the only sense in which this is a tragicomedy. To send up the villains from the start, and get fairly close to doing that with the heroine and her mute child (here an adult) too, is to diminish, at least to a degree, the grandeur and seriousness of much of the astonishingly inspired music that Handel lavished on this drama.