Julia Bullock in Theodora
(Picture: Camilla Greenwell)Katie Mitchell’s new production of Handel’s Theodora comes bristling with warnings of sexual violence and exploitation. It was also recently revealed that the production team had availed themselves of an “intimacy coordinator” to help negotiate the more intrusive moments. Handel’s work, to a libretto by Thomas Morrell, tells the story of the Christian martyr Theodora, threatened with the horrors of a Roman brothel for failing to renounce her religion. A fate worse than death, she opines, a view which allows her to submit to her ultimate death sentence with equanimity.
In Mitchell’s avowedly feminist reworking of the plot, the 4th-century governor of Antioch, Valens, becomes a Roman ambassador in a modern setting. Theodora and her devoted friend Irene, employed as kitchen staff in his household, are members of a fundamentalist religious sect plotting to destroy the embassy.
Handel’s drama is about a clash of belief systems and there are enough intersections in Mitchell’s radical updating to justify it in principle. We see the oppressive patriarchy through Theodora’s eyes and without giving too much away, there’s a wonderful climactic moment of revenge for the sisterhood. The armed resistance goes on.
Chloe Lamford’s ingeniously mobile set allows us to see the action from different perspectives. But there’s too much fussy and unclear detail, especially in the first act, and I lost count of the number of arias sung while a gun was aimed at the singer. By the third act the concept has become clearer. This is not the story of Morrell’s pious, chaste victims, but one about empowered women prepared to challenge their objectification and violation.
Those of a more traditional persuasion will have found scenes in Acts I and II the most challenging. Theodora, supposedly “clad in robes of virgin white” for her celebrated Angels, Ever Bright and Fair, is here prepared for the brothel extension within the embassy by being sheathed in a tight-fitting sparkly dress and white wig. Her prison is a red-velvet den, the rotating figures of her aria With Darkness Deep reflected in the gyrations of two scantily-clad pole-dancers. In the other vocal highpoint of the work, the duet To Thee, Thou Glorious Son of Worth, in which Theodora and her lover Didymus change clothes to allow her to escape, the Polish countertenor Jakub Orlinski is required to strip to his briefs and don the sparkly dress and wig. It’s a Some Like it Hot moment that risks titters, not least when the novice is taught the basics of pole-dancing to the words “The youth begins to rise”.
If the sublimity of the finest pages in the score is wilfully undercut, the musical performance also has its dubious aspects. Julia Bullock (Theodora) and Ed Lyon (Septimius) are both excellent singers but not entirely idiomatic in the style, Gyula Orendt (Valens) even less so. Joyce DiDonato sings all Irene’s arias with superb control of line and tone colour. Deeply moving she is too, but the only singer in the cast who’s a natural Handelian is Orlinski, whose stylish, rapturous delivery stands as a model of how it should be done. Sadly, even he was compromised by Harry Bicket’s breakneck tempi in the first act, which also resulted in shambolic ensemble in the opening chorus. Neither the Royal Opera Chorus nor the orchestra are at home in this repertoire, though Bicket did draw some finer things from them as the evening proceeded.
Mitchell’s is a bold, radical rethinking of the work with some stirring theatrical moments, though an additional warning to avert the eyes in places might have been welcomed by some.
