Royal Opera House, LondonA quartet of staged vocal works, including terrific renditions of Handel’s Apollo e Dafne and Britten’s Phaedra, welcomes back live audiences
The Royal Opera opened its doors to its first post-lockdown live audience for 4/4, a quartet of staged vocal works, none of them originally intended for the theatre, all of them dealing in some way with isolation. They share a designer in Antony McDonald, though each is allocated a different conductor and director, with McDonald himself tackling the second of the sequence, Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. He transforms the work from a bittersweet study of a child’s growing awareness of transience into a poignant examination of adult loneliness, in which an unnamed woman (Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha) remembers, or imagines, life with a family now absent, or which she may indeed never have had.
Adele Thomas’s production of Handel’s 1710 cantata Apollo e Dafne starts out as an erotic
comedy but turns troubling as Jonathan McGovern’s Apollo becomes obsessive in his pursuit of Alexandra Lowe’s Dafne, before divine intervention leaves him crestfallen, self-pitying and alone. Deborah Warner stages Britten’s Phaedra for Christine Rice and does too much with it by bringing on stage not only Hippolytus (Matthew Ball from the Royal Ballet) but also the Minotaur (Andres Presno) as the symbolic embodiment of the irrational nature of desire. Richard Jones’s take on HK Gruber’s Frankenstein!!, meanwhile, re-imagines its protagonist (Allan Clayton) as a self-obsessed rock star locked in a codependent relationship with his silently besotted assistant (Dawn Woolongong).