A surfeit of sex, skulduggery and self-interest makes Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea the most deliciously amoral of operas. Laced with acid wit, it also happens to be very funny, a fact not always realised by director Walter Sutcliffe in this serviceable modern-dress production for the Grange festival.
Emperor Nero’s machinations to replace his obdurate wife, Octavia, with the coolly calculating Poppea are highly entertaining. Of course, there’s nothing new about politicians behaving badly, and Sutcliffe pulls off a couple of scenic updates brilliantly. Nero and Poppea have some of the most erotic language in all opera. Watching them sexting each other, their steamy words complete with mischievous emoticons projected overhead, is hilarious. Nero and Lucan drugging themselves up to the eyeballs also works a treat, the actors navigating a fine line between toxic masculinity and an awkward homoeroticism.
There are some bum steers, however. Jon Bausor’s drab temple set with its wobbly columns is flanked by ugly staircases, from which singers struggle to be heard; the costumes feel hastily made when they should convey Italian haute couture; and the badly synchronised surtitles splashed across the scenery in the prologue are distracting. Poppea’s ancient nurse is commonly portrayed by a man in drag. Having the otherwise satisfactory Frances Gregory play her as a bespectacled PA loses much of the comedy and all of the libretto’s acerbic wisdom on the subject of old age. Meanwhile the decision to have Seneca’s friends sing invisibly from the wings robs the evening of one of its most sumptuous musical episodes, and the choral pomp and circumstance of the consuls and tribunes crowning Poppea is cut altogether.
Musically, there are few cavils. David Bates leads La Nuova Musica in a surging account of Monteverdi’s glittering score with three theorbos, guitars, a lirone and two triple harps, making for a mighty twanging of strings in the pit. The conductor’s enthusiastic exhortations are occasionally distracting but well worth it.
Successfully hoicking her plush alto into soprano territory, Kitty Whately sings a radiant Poppea – more easygoing and less purely manipulative than some. If her Nero, Sam Furness, lacks the character’s psychotic edge, he makes up for it with well-crafted acting and a ringing tenor, though he occasionally tires at the top.
The rest are outstanding. Anna Bonitatibus’s magnificently sung Octavia is pure tigress; countertenor Christopher Lowrey sings with prodigious strength and tone as Poppea’s jilted lover, Otho; and Jonathan Lemalu is a commanding Seneca with an unwavering moral compass. In smaller roles, Jorge Navarro Colorado and Gwilym Bowen engage in dazzling coloratura as Nero’s dozy bodyguards; Vanessa Waldhart makes a vivacious Drusilla; and the indomitable Fiona Kimm steals the show as Octavia’s uproariously unprincipled antediluvian nurse.
