Handel collides with The Wicker Man in Adele Thomas’s production of Semele at Glyndebourne. When we reach the denouement, the eponymous heroine – the mortal mistress of Jove, fatally tricked into demanding he cast off his human disguise and reveal himself in his full, cataclysmic divinity – is immured in a massive wicker effigy of her rival Juno, which goes up in flames as the chorus look on. It’s a striking coup de théâtre in an otherwise somewhat lacklustre staging and a dour take on what is essentially a barbed Restoration comedy.
Handel took as his text a libretto by William Congreve, previously set by John Eccles, about the relationship between desire, ambition and opportunism. Thomas, however, is thinking more in terms of emotional and sexual rebellion, and her Thebes becomes an anonymous modern landscape (it looks like scrubland), where Joélle Harvey’s Semele, already pregnant by Stuart Jackson’s Jove, longs to escape from both the prurient mockery of the community around her and the arranged marriage that her father Cadmus (Clive Bayley) is trying to force her into with Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen’s Athamas.
