Bold, self-assured reimagining of Monteverdi: Opera North’s Orpheus reviewed

You wouldn’t like Tamerlano when he’s angry. ‘My heart seethes with rage,’ he sings, in Act III of Handel’s opera – spraying coloratura about the stage like Silly String on a 1980s kids’ TV show. That’s the deal with baroque opera: the emotional register is extreme and you’re either in the moment or you might as well leave the theatre. Literal realism, clearly, is not the point – making it even more necessary for a modern director to sketch in some hint of a social or cultural framework in which we can locate and comprehend these hyper-real characters. The music is too hot and too strong to work as drama in a purely abstract setting. Pare it back too far and you’re left with five maniacs screaming at each other in a black box.

But opera is always a balancing act: an endlessly renegotiated union of multiple arts. The setting – the whole concept – of Opera North’s new Orpheus is strikingly original and brilliantly achieved. We’re in the back garden of a suburban semi in (let’s say) Leeds, where two families are gathering for a wedding. Orpheus and his friends are semi-posh white kids; Eurydice and her relatives are of Indian heritage. They’re all dressed in their finest, and they’re clearly relaxed with each other, exchanging hugs and smiles. A double orchestra is assembled on the patio: a little baroque band, with Laurence Cummings directing from the harpsichord, and alongside them, led by Jasdeep Singh Degun on sitar, the tablas, bansuris and esrajs of the Indian classical tradition. Anna Himali Howard’s direction makes it all look wholly natural; only the weird colours that occasionally flush the West Riding sky suggest that higher powers might be in play.

This is as bold and self-assured a re-imagining of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo as you’ll ever encounter. ‘Music by Claudio Monteverdi and Jasdeep Singh Degun’ reads the programme, and it’s a full-scale re-composition, in which Monteverdi’s music alternates (and occasionally merges) with extensive brand-new material by Degun. Both traditions are given the space to be themselves, and if Howard struggles, initially, to create much sense of action on such a crowded stage, she certainly captures the authentic wedding sensation of standing around for hours, waiting for something to happen. Wouldn’t anyone have brought around a plate of samosas? After the interval, in Hades, Howard inverts realism into a genuinely unnerving vision of Orpheus’s inner darkness, in which Caronte (Kaviraj Singh) and Pluto (Dean Robinson) mock and thunder, dressed in black.

It’s visually imaginative and musically exquisite, with Nicholas Watts as a sweet-voiced hipster Orpheus at the centre of the story. There’s no question, though, that Monteverdi’s pointed, light-footed music and the generally restrained playing and singing of Cummings’s team was thoroughly upstaged by Degun’s sections – not merely because of the gorgeous range of timbres available from the Indian ensemble, but also the sheer length and bravura of what sounded (to unversed ears) like extended improvisations. Two male vocalists riffed off each other in exuberant competition; a barnstorming percussion duel for tabla and ghatam brought spontaneous applause from the audience. Doubts began to surface, even as the ears tingled: with such musical splendour in the foreground, it grew harder and harder to maintain an emotional connection with the characters, or to cling to the thread of the (much-attenuated) plot. And yes – perhaps that’s not a million miles from the way baroque audiences experienced opera.

Here in post-romantic 2022, though, many opera-goers still like to commit to the story as well as the music. Which brings us back to Tamerlano, and James Conway’s trimmed-down staging for English Touring Opera. The set is a vaguely industrial space; the costumes are contemporary operatic-generic. There are trench coats. ‘Are they meant to be the cast of Red Dwarf?’ asked my companion, but that would have given more sense of the social dynamics: some visual clue as to why one bloke in a jerkin is being so relentlessly vicious to the bloke in the different-coloured jerkin. The audience is left with a lot of homework.

Instead, Conway’s Tamerlano gets by on an old ETO strength: casting. Rodrigo Sosa Dal Pozzo as a mellow-sounding Tamerlano, set against James Hall’s eloquent and ardent Andronico. With Jorge Navarro Colorado as an anguished Bajazet, the company played naturally off each other, and off the earthy period-instrument orchestra under Jonathan Peter Kenny – recovering smartly when (on this particular night at Malvern) the performance broke down in Act III. The star of the evening was Ellie Laugharne as Asteria: dignified and expressive, singing with an aching purity that was matched by acting of unaffected sincerity. She’s compelling, without ever being insistent: one of those singers who don’t make the big headlines, but are unfailingly excellent in everything they touch.