Shaw hand

When is a rape not a rape? It’s an unsettling question — far more so than anything offered up by the current headline-grabbing William Tell at the Royal Opera House — and one that lies beneath the meticulous dramatic archaeology of Fiona Shaw’s The Rape of Lucretia. Unlike William Tell, however, there seems little chance of this attack starting riots. Where the director of Tell asserts, Shaw interrogates — a delicate, insistent questioning that probes further and more intrusively, a violation of ideological rather than physical absolutes.

Debuted in 2013 as part of the company’s touring season, Shaw’s production now returns to the main festival, where the chamber opera had its première in 1946. Excavating the tale of Lucretia from under the black earth of Michael Levine’s austerely beautiful set, the Male and Female Chorus also look back to the circumstances of the opera’s own composition. Dressed in the drab clothes of recent wartime, they remind us that Rome’s abuse at the hands of the invader-Etruscans could so easily have been their — and our — own, that this rape is one of nation-state as much as of individual.

Ronald Duncan’s libretto frames its classical story with a post-Christian morality, fussily swathing it in a modesty-cloth of sanctimony that risks obscuring the fleshy interest beneath. It’s a problem for any director, and one Shaw tackles aggressively. Religion is the alpha and omega here, from the opening tableau of the male body entombed in earth to the closing image of the crucified Christ, but as to whether it can heal, solve, or merely console is left bleakly uncertain.

Britten’s instruction that his two Chorus figures ‘comment upon the action but do not take part in it’ is defied by the passionate interventions Shaw demands of them.