Saved by the chorus

We’ve cried wolf with Handel. Ever since the modern trend began for staging the composer’s oratorios we’ve hailed each one in turn as the composer’s ‘most dramatic’. We’ve said it of Theodora, Saul, perhaps loudest (and most persuasively) of Jephtha. The trouble is that now, nearly 40 years since we last saw Belshazzar on an English stage, this magnificent drama of warring armies and nations, grieving parents and defiant children returns and we’ve spent all our superlatives. So you’ll just have to trust me when I say that it’s really quite good.

A narcissistic sybarite of a king rules over a land bloated with corruption, rife with factions. You’d have to try pretty hard to miss the resonances of Handel’s biblical drama, yet somehow director Daniel Slater does exactly that in an awkward contemporary staging that feels mired in the literal. Handel’s opera may flirt with the exotic east, but it’s only window-dressing. His Persians, Jews and Babylonians are ciphers for rivals closer to home, his opera an English cousin to Rembrandt’s famous painting of Belshazzar — more Bruges than Babylon.

But it’s another painting, Bruegel’s ‘The Tower of Babel’, that designer Robert Innes Hopkins here takes as inspiration. His budget Babel teeters rather than towers, a sort of panoptic Dalek looming over the action. Its apologetic, rickety grandeur sets the tone for a production that wants Old Testament impact but has far too many New Testament scruples. Acrobats tumble and cavort, choruses writhe and grope (then grope some more), armies stamp and brandish, but to what end? Seedy rather than erotic, camp rather than awe-inspiring — these are orgies by John Lewis, invasions by Thomas Cook.