Lightning, it would appear, can strike twice in the Chiltern Hills. In 2022, director John Caird and conductor Laurence Cummings collaborated on a much-admired staging of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, a seminal work from 1607. Four years later, and it’s the turn of Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, another terrific slice of baroque music theatre. Like Ulysses, it took Monteverdi decades to find his way back to the genre he’d helped define during his middle period in Mantua. Inspired by the newly commercial operatic world of late-1630s Venice, he fashioned a hit show with dramatic insight and plenty of special effects to pull in the crowds.
Robert Jones has salvaged elements of his Orfeo set design, with musicians seated on verdant terraces surrounded by crumbling frescoed walls. The opulent costumes, some of them apparently repurposed as a cost-saving measure (although you’d never know), encase the Greek gods in shimmering Elizabethan robes and ruffs. The mortals, clad in whites and creams, feel as if they’ve wandered in from an Edwardian country house party. Paul Pyant’s elegant lighting surrounds it all with a golden aura. Magical moments, such as Neptune rising from the sea, or the arrival of Telemaco on Minerva’s chariot, are pulled off with an unpretentious ingenuity.
