Joyce DiDonato seduces you within the first 10 minutes: Royal Opera’s Agrippina reviewed

‘Laws bow down before the desire to rule…’ Centuries before ‘proroguing’ had entered British breakfast-table vocabulary there was Handel’s Agrippina, and centuries before that there was the woman herself. Sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius (who she may or may not have poisoned) and mother of Nero (by whom she was eventually executed), Agrippina was a true political animal: instigator, manipulator, machinatrix and far more.

It’s a heady story in prose, so add a bit of poetic licence and a score by the 24-year-old Handel and you have a spicy blend of politics, satire and sex — Succession with a Roman accent.

Let’s pass over the bewilderment that it has taken the Royal Opera more than 300 years to stage the piece and celebrate instead the fact that England’s flagship house has finally arrived at one of Handel’s greatest black comedies, staged here by the Komische Oper’s in-demand artistic director Barrie Kosky. Perhaps they were waiting for a mezzo big enough to fill Agrippina’s gilded sandals? In Joyce DiDonato they certainly have one. But it’s testimony to a real ensemble cast that, despite her mesmerising central performance, the result is far from the DiDonato Show.

Kosky and designer Rebecca Ringst house Handel’s gallery of grotesques in a sleek revolving box, all chrome and steel and strip-lit, surgically white interiors — the plain sight in which schemes and intrigue must hide. Fortress or prison, penthouse or battleship, it’s a stylish frame for Kosky’s eccentrics and outsiders, whose slick tailoring and contemporary couture (Klaus Bruns, striking just the right note of excess) hold neurosis, ambition and perversion in check. At least at first glance.

DiDonato’s Agrippina is all imperious control and weaponised sexuality, a consummate performer who seduces two courtiers (as well as the audience) within the first ten minutes, all in the name of getting her son elected Emperor.