BWW Reviews: THE CORONATION OF POPPEA, The Kings Head Theatre, April 12 2011

It's in the eyes that we recognise the depth of Poppea's lust for the crown, the crown with which her lover, the Emperor Nero teases and teases her, his lust for her body as great as hers for the office of Empress. He has what she wants; she has what he wants - what could possibly go wrong?

OperaUpClose's new version of Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea (in rep at The King's Head) compresses sacrifices and sopranos, torture and tenors, blood and baritones on to a stage so small that it amplifies the passions swirling about the Roman court. Jessica Walker (a woman playing a man who would originally have been played by a castrato) is terrifying when portraying Nero's absolute power, but tender in the arms of Zoe Bonner's ruthless Poppea, a foxy lady with all that animal's cunning and destructive power. There's fine support from a variety of voices with Martin Nelson's doomed Seneca's depth of principle echoed in his sonorous singing and Rebecca Caine's rejected Ottavia's defiance captured beautifully in her delivery of Michael Nyman's newly written intervention aria foretelling the dreadful fate of the imperial lovers.

In Mark Ravenhill's version of The Coronation of Poppea, the love, well lust, story plays out against courtly machinations familiar to readers of I Claudius or those, like me, who studied Monteverdi's almost exact contemporary William Shakespeare's tragedy, Julius Caesar. But this is opera and driving the actors, sometimes soaring above the drama, sometimes hitting you as much between the eyes as between the ears, is the music. Alex Silverman's jazz-inflected orchestration for piano, saxophone and double bass suggests the hot, claustrophobic atmosphere of a New Orleans speakeasy, another environment in which violence underpinned power. Like Poppea, Nero and imperial might, voices, music and orchestration are a perfect fit.   

Despite its fidelity to Monteverdi's 369-years-old original work, this is a production as contemporary as anything about Jerry Springer or Anna Nicole Smith - after all, unchallenged rulers in Rome still fail to listen to wise counsel and fall prey to the wiles of ambitious young women, don't they?         

 

To post a comment, you must register and login.