Robin Norton-Hale’s new staging of The Coronation of Poppea for English Touring Opera is her first production for the company since her appointment as general director last year. It’s a striking if uneven piece of theatre. She can be insightful in her approach to Monteverdi’s examination of unfettered desire, and she retains the metaphysical overlay that some directors play down. She is less successful, perhaps, when it comes to the opera’s politics. And there are musical inequalities as well.
Norton-Hale pulls the work forward into a stylised present. Rome, designed by Basia Bińkowska, is a place of geometric shapes and abstractions, vaguely suggestive of Italian futurism. The protagonists look chic in haute couture. The gods, slumming it in street clothes (a nice touch), gaze down on, and intervene in, the drama from above, while the planets, spinning out both human and divine destiny, revolve slowly over everyone’s heads.
