Handel’s Agrippina directed by David McVicar film screening

TheatreHD and Tsaritsyno State Museum-Reserve present the project Tsaritsyno. Opera at the Movies.

On 22 January 2022, at 15:00, Tsaritsyno Museum-Reserve will present the opera Agrippina, directed by David McVicar.

In January 2020, Sergei Solovyov completed a short film called Those Who don’t Like Handel will be Roughly Handled. David McVicar’s production of an early opera by the baroque music genius could help anyone avoid bodily harm and become a Handel fan. The great three-hour opera seria (‘serious opera’) that Handel wrote at the age of 24, in 1709, looks like a perfect comedy in the Scottish theatre wit’s version. What’s more, the comedy is modern, even though it is the oldest opera ever to be in the Metropolitan Opera’s repertoire. Sex and politics will survive any virus, and McVicar sets the story of macabre intrigue at the Roman imperial court as a game of two eternal human passions – lust for flesh and lust for power. In an abstract setting where the centre of attraction is the way up to the throne, a golden open staircase, and modern costumes replacing togas and armour. He does it with complete reliance on the opera scenario, with faith, so to speak, in the source material, without putting other, paradoxical meanings into the story or violating it with his dubious fantasies.

Agrippina, the wife of Emperor Claudius, who supposedly perished in the depths of the sea, seeks to bring her son from her first marriage, Nero, to power with the servants Pallas and Narcissus as stooges. But Claudius returns, rescued by the faithful commander Ottone, whom he appoints his successor. And then Agrippina has to play the ‘love’ card: more than the throne, Ottone desires Poppaea, who both Claudius and Nero are fascinated by; by resorting to lies and playing on others’ heartstrings, Agrippina moves confidently towards her goal.

In the end, everyone gets what they want; further historical events (Agrippina will be murdered on the order of her son; according to the apocrypha she herself will ask the executioners to stab her in the stomach – as a sign of remorse for bringing Nero into the world) are not taken into account by Handel, the Italian librettist Vincenzo Grimani and the vivacious MacVicar.

The curtain of Agrippina is projected with the image of the Capitoline She-wolf and Romulus and Remus clinging to her teats: a picture that Francis Bacon would have envisioned (the stage and costume design is by John MacFarlane, a regular collaborator of McVicar). It’s very beautiful, but it’s a false trail: to Bacon’s dark expressionism, McVicar prefers the frivolity and elegance of modernist salons; in other episodes, Agrippina looks like a dramatisation of an unwritten play by Oscar Wilde.

This MET opera is one of those fairly rare performances that is acceptable to write about as a dramatic production. The acting is beyond dispute, as is the work of musical director Harry Bicket, who does not aspire to an authentic baroque feel but makes up for it with an almost Broadway-esque drive.

But musical quality is in default; after all, we don’t come to the theatre and cinema just to listen to opera. And Agrippina 2020 is a sight to behold. Joyce DiDonato, in the title role, is the quintessential strong woman: not just an active schemer but a mythological dominatrix who has all the traits of commanding film stars from Natalia Gundareva to Helen Mirren. The duet with Nero, an aggressive punk teenager, who easily swaps a T-shirt that looks like it came off a Cure and Agatha Christie fan for a fitted business suit, is a venturesome bisexual act, with the explosive Kate Lindsey, a graduate of Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, as Nero.

Agrippina DiDonato meets the military-uniformed Pallas (Duncan Rock ironically plays on the macho officer and gentleman cliché) as a secret Latin lover. Narcisse’s (countertenor Nicholas Tamagna) embrace is squeamishly and grudgingly waved off. McVicar sets up a meeting between Agrippina and Narcissus in the theatre, a perfect excuse for a gag with shushing the chatting audience. And in another unpredictably topical twist, Agrippina sings ‘Whatever fate has in store for me, I’ll take it in my hands’ while wiping her palms with a disinfectant solution – as if McVicar knew that a week after the last performance of the opera, the world would become paranoid about safety.

Brenda Rae, making her Met debut as Poppea, is a typical 21st-century glamourous courtesan, a potential Instagram queen, who in her moments of contemplation pounces on chocolate, her boudoir adorned with invitingly open red lips. In the archaic work, McVicar also finds occasion for more than topical political satire – in an episode of Nero’s hypocritical flirtation with the plebs, ‘charity’ aid – nonsense instant noodles – are handed out to poor tramps in the crosshairs of TV cameras.

The main point is that here – in and around the play – everyone is lying, except the simple-minded Ottone (countertenor Iestyn Davies), who is happy to get deceived, for which he endures. It’s one hell of a comedy. But McVicar wouldn’t be an outstanding director if he hadn’t heard Handel’s music, which has room for both sarcasm and high tragedy. There is a fine line between the two, which materialises in statuary and majestic mise-en-scènes; If you sing before breakfast, you will cry before night. We laughed so hard, but ‘the sound surrounds both left and right with a vague, mysterious army in the distance’. And who there still doesn’t like Handel?