Alcina review – Handel’s opera of sex and sorcery comes alive in vivid staging

Handel, but make it fun. Perhaps that was Richard Jones’s brief for his production of Alcina, first seen here in 2022 and revived by Sarah Fahie, its original movement director. And of all Handel’s operas perhaps it’s this one, with its desert-island storyline of sorcery and sex – what happens on the island stays on the island – that invites this treatment.

Jones makes the “good guys” into members of a kind of puritan cult, so the tension between the moral world and the sensual, instinctive one is less of a gentle pull, more a tug of war. Alcina’s prisoners are transformed by a squirt of her eponymous perfume into birds and animals – a parrot, a mandrill, a King Charles spaniel, all wearing prosthetic heads so beautifully made that for the past year or two they have been in display cases in the Royal Opera House foyer. The animals are kept busy fawning over Alcina or moving Antony McDonald’s sets around: there’s a huge bed, a greenhouse and an enchanted forest on wheeled platforms, found behind the doors of what might be a hotel corridor. It’s a wide stage, and there’s often at least one singer running across it. Amid all this, the opera’s moments of warmth, insight and introspection risk getting lost or at least overshadowed. It’s brittle, but it is entertaining.

It’s also very well sung, even if the heft of the Royal Opera House orchestra in the pit, whipped through the score by conductor David Bates, means that the singers don’t always have much room for nuance. For a revival to keep hold of the original cast is usually a good sign, and so it proves again here. The apology made before curtain-up on behalf of Lisette Oropesa – suffering from a heavy cold but singing Alcina anyway – proved redundant; she’s imperious in the role, her soprano gleaming and athletic as she strides across the stage in her Louboutins. Emily D’Angelo sings Ruggiero’s flourishes with striking control and presence, Mary Bevan’s softer-edged soprano catches Morgana’s fickle sensuousness and Ru Charlesworth’s Oronte has a nice line in singing through gritted teeth. Of the newcomers, Edward Grint is authoritative as the cult elder Melisso and the boy soprano Thomas Mayes sings Oberto with winning assurance, but it’s Beth Taylor’s heartfelt, powerfully sung Bradamante who brings most of the moments where this Alcina is not only fun, but moving too.