Pole-dancers, dissidents, and Joyce DiDonato in a triumphant “Theodora”
<First published online in the Financial Times on February 2, 2022>
Three parallel rooms are visible across the Covent Garden stage. On the right, Joyce DiDonato, as the Christian dissident Irene, is leading the embassy staff in thoughts of liberty and prayer. In the centre, sex workers are pole-dancing. On the left, Julia Bullock, as the embassy worker Theodora, is lying on a bed, motionless, numb, in post-rape trauma.
This is just one haunting image from the Royal Opera’s production of Handel’s Theodora. Fabulously suspenseful even over three and a half hours as conducted by Harry Bicket and directed by Katie Mitchell, this is an astonishing, multi-layered triumph.
Mitchell has been often a controversial director in theatre and opera, sometimes irksome. But this Theodora, the greatest achievement I’ve seen from her in more than 30 years, finds her at her most imaginatively poetic: she conjures marvels with the basic ingredients of time, space and meaning. Often we are shown very unalike actions occurring simultaneously, in two or three adjacent rooms. Words say one thing, music suggests another, stage actions show yet further complexities. And in several key scenes, crucial events unfold in stunningly slow motion, even while the music’s pulse keeps beating steadily. It’s as if we’re watching out of time, in shock.
The staging transposes the narrative about Roman overlords and Christian martyrs from fourth-century Antioch to a 21st-century embassy. Subversive turmoil is brewing among the kitchen staff; the public and the personal are combined in a riveting mix of politics, religion, class, sex, love, humiliation and trauma. Bringing drag and pole-dancing into this tale without camp or sensationalism is just part of Mitchell’s alchemy. Even in the closing seconds, you watch on tenterhooks: what will happen next?
Musically enthralling from first to last, this Theodora is led by the American soprano Julia Bullock as the heroine Theodora, the Polish countertenor Jakub Josef Orlinski as her lover Didymus, and the American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as Irene, a central figure among the staff’s Christian dissidents. At every moment, singing and playing are dramatically impelled, perhaps especially in vocal embellishments. Even episodes of energetic passagework tug us into the narrative, rather than hurl out display.
Bullock and Orlinski lead the production into its most unforgettably poignant scenes. Theodora is punished by being made a sex worker, with glittery short dress, platinum blonde wig and high heels; Didymus, discovering her degradation, saves her by swapping clothes. Their scenes here become heart-in-mouth experiences. The way that Theodora’s thoughts turn to God as she finds herself between two pole-dancers perfectly illustrates the escapist flights of a traumatised victim’s mind. When Didymus — in Theodora’s apparel — takes up pole-dancing, he makes it a bleak embodiment of hopelessness.
Bullock, though her diction could be clearer, fills the music with feeling both dark and bright. Orlinski, a Handelian stylist of fascinating eloquence and virtuosity, sometimes sustains single high notes with a transcendent, gleaming purity that irradiates the whole drama. The most multi-faceted singing of all is DiDonato’s: she can be vehement and quiet at the same time, both deeply compassionate and raptly inspired. The British tenor Ed Lyon (Didymus’s friend Septimius), the Polish bass Gyula Orendt (the Roman ambassador Valens) and the Royal Opera chorus all become vital elements.
Handel gave the premiere of Theodora at Covent Garden in 1750. It proved a flop, but one in which he believed. This 2022 production demonstrates his dramatic mastery. Until less than 50 years ago, his operas were staged as oratorios, exercises in dramatic stasis and as vehicles for park-and-bark acting. Now his oratorios — a genre to which he turned when opera proved too expensive — are being revealed as superb theatre.
On Monday night, fans of great vocalism were out in force, immediately hailing Bullock, Orlinski, DiDonato and Lyon after their most remarkable arias. Yet Bicket’s seamless pacing made it easy to feel that here, perhaps more than in any other work, Handel was thinking in gripping spans far longer than individual numbers. How gratifying that, 272 years on, Handel the great Covent Garden dramatist has come into his own.
@New York Times, 2022