Handel for hipsters

On a sward of AstroTurf somewhere off Silicon Roundabout, Mountain Media is hosting its summer party and, well, it’s the sort of bash you’d pluck your own eyes out to avoid. Hipsters sprawl on dayglo beanbags. Lads wearing fairy wings strike aftershave-advert attitudes as they swig bottled lager, while girls in vintage dresses pout into smart phones through cardboard Instagram frames. Naturally, it’s got its own hashtags: everything is flashed up on digital screens. The only thing that jars — though perhaps it’s some new straight-outta-Hoxton trend — is that instead of a DJ there’s a live band, and the music’s by Handel.

Handel’s English-language tragedy Acis and Galatea was once one of his most bankable properties. Georgian audiences couldn’t get enough of nymphs and shepherds, the zombies of the early 18th century. But beyond the rustic charms of Handel’s score — all warbling recorders and artlessly crafted melodies — you’re left with a wisp of a story (from Ovid’s Metamorphoses) which ends with the hero turning into a fountain and whose most compelling character is a Cyclops. Confronted with the scruffy intimacy of Lilian Baylis House, director Sarah Tipple and designer Justin Nardella took their cue from Ovid and opted for complete transformation: an urban pastoral set in a world every bit as unreal as Arcadia.

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So the love of the shepherd Acis (Alexander Sprague) and Galatea — sorry,@galatea_89 (Lucy Hall) — became a workplace romance, while the jealous rage of Polyphemus (Matthew Durkan) was fuelled by a social-media humiliation. Operatic voices rarely sound great in industrial spaces, still less in the round, but the cast clearly enjoyed the concept and they inhabited their characters both physically and vocally, whether through Sprague’s graceful way with a phrase, Durkan’s dark, rolling outbursts or the way Hall’s soprano tightened with grief and then bloomed in the final scenes.