The London Handel festival has always offered plenty of opportunities to hear the composer’s music in his own church, St George’s, Hanover Square. But this year, like last, the most interesting event takes audiences somewhere unfamiliar: to Trinity Buoy Wharf this time, an old storehouse on a windswept Docklands bank just across from the O2. As an optional extra you can even travel there by boat, serenaded by an oboe-bassoon quartet. As you prepare to disembark, the conceit of Jack Furness’s production begins to kick in. The charming onboard host turns out to be the assistant director of a film company, here to give us a gentle heads-up about his boss before we sit in on a shoot – for a film of Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo. He’s visionary but volatile, we’re warned. Things may get heated.
And they do, gratifyingly so, thanks to the riveting performances Furness gets from his cast – three singers, plus the actor Durassie Kiangangu as the assistant. The bullying director we’re warned about is Polifemo – a lustful cyclops in the mythical story Handel was retelling – and his victims are his two stars. The drama unfolds around and within the film shoot, in front of us and onscreen, via handheld camera. The film and a translation of the Italian text are projected on to a huge double door which, in a gesture that seems almost magical in context, slides open to let Galatea the sea nymph – or perhaps the singer playing her – walk out into the darkness, the water and the twinkling lights beyond.
