The wry observation – no joke given the seriousness of the material – that the Royal Opera’s new staging of Theodora failed to deliver the sex and violence promised may have worn thin by the time you read this. All to the good. Katie Mitchell’s take on Handel’s late oratorio, first performed in London in 1750, is far superior to the blizzard of warning signals that preceded it, and far less radical too. Most of the advance alerts were irrelevant for anyone with even mildly robust 21st-century sensibilities.
This tragedy of a virginal Christian woman persecuted by the Romans, set to an English libretto by Thomas Morell, contains some of the most affecting and inward-looking music Handel wrote. Therein lies the shock: that his economy of means could produce music of such grief. Mitchell’s updating honoured that solemnity, as did the star cast led by the soprano Julia Bullock as Theodora, the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as her friend Irene, and the countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński as the Christian convert Didymus.
