Partenope and Ballet Shoes in London
I. Handel & Partenope
Who knew, fifty years ago, that Handel’s operas (and his more stageable oratorios) were to occupy so large a part in the repertory of subsequent decades? Who knew that the nature of Handelian music drama would keep becoming ever more multifaceted in our era? In London, although Covent Garden, in recent years, has made the staging of Handel’s music dramas an important project, English National Opera has achieved most.
In 1979, the English National Opera “Julius Caesar”(Charles Mackerras conducting, John Copley directing, with Janet Baker, Valerie Masterson, Sarah Walker, Della Jones, John Tomlinson) showed how a traditional delivery of Handel opera could be engrossing, multifaceted, moving. A little over five years later, Nicholas Hytner’s ENO staging of “Xerxes” (Mackerras conducting Ann Murray, Masterson, and Lesley Garrett) became a perfect example of a postmodern take on Handel opera: wittily ironic, historically detached, but also emotionally vivid. These unalike productions were just forerunners of the ENO Handel peaks that were to follow: I single out only Ann Murray in “Ariodante” (1993) and Sarah Connolly in “Agrippina” (2006) as examples of dramatic interpretations that left enduring scars on the memory.
I’m sorry that, until now, life on the opposite side of the Atlantic kept me from Christopher Alden’s production of Handel’s “Partenope”, which won awards when new in 2008. Handel’s story is essentially a comedy about Queen Partenope’s choice between her suitors, notably Arsace and Armindo. (A nice complication is the supplementary presence of a woman in male disguise.) Alden relocates this to the debonair era of the 1920s, but the marvel is how, while catching the glamour, stylishness, and fun of this opera, he keeps showing its dramatic ambivalence: he knows both how to make us laugh at situations that we’d usually find unfunny – and also how to wipe the laughter off our faces. Better, he helps us feel that this seriocomic ambivalence is what Handel wanted.
Alden, who has staged this revival, also adds wonderful notes of crazy surrealism. (In Act Two, the number of good jokes he keeps finding from a loo is epic.) The feckless suitor Armindo (the American countertenor Jake Ingbar) falls down a staircase in rolling slow motion; he sings one aria as a tap dance. The suitor Emilio becomes a surrealist artist. Though these comic twists are all modern, they fit Handel so well that they make us re-think the eighteenth century.
English National Opera has assembled an exceptional cast of singing actors. Partenope is the tall British soprano Nardus Williams, an exhilarating and glamorous presence throughout, a tad wild with some top notes but stylish in phrasing and exuberant in her ability to break into dance while singing. Ingbar, making his ENO debut as Armindo, is engaging in every way. The mezzosoprano Katy Bray’s burning seriousness (as Rosmira, mainly disguised as Eurimene) and the tenor Ru Charlesworth’s impish comic flair (as Emilio) are such valuable ingredients that you want to see more at ince of what they can do. And it’s the wonderful countertenor Hugh Cutting as Arsace who does most to show us the emotional pain that eventually sorts out this comedy. In Act Three, Cutting/Arsace has two stunning arias in fairly quick succession. In the first, he reaches zones of confused anguish that recall Murray’s Ariodante; in the second, he reflects on the power of music. Both solos are the peaks of this marvellous revival.
II. Ballet Shoes
In the Olivier Theatre, the National Theatre has revived last year’s Christmas production of “Ballet Shoes”, Kendall Feaver’s drastic overhaul of Noel Streatfeild’s rightly beloved 1936 novel. I’ve no objection to dear old “Ballet Shoes” being adapted to include people of colour and a lesbian and other diversities, but there are too many stock clichés here: the toughly winsome Nana, as played by Lesley Nicol, has no original qualities whatsoever, while the three central Fossil children are irksomely shrill, though Petrova (Sienna Arif-Knights) and Pauline (Nina Cassells) have moments of freshness in scenes away from the family. Characters are often asked to speak over music, at the expense of their words being understood.
As often when one actor is given several roles, Justin Salinger rises marvellously to the challenge of playing Great Uncle Matthew, the aged ballerina Madame Fidolia, the French étoile Madame Manoff, and other roles. His Mme Fidolia, turbaned and swathed in furs and heavy with old Ballet Russe wisdom, is the staging’s greatest charm, labouring to make young Posy into a ballerina. The production’s composer, Asaf Zohar, has made much of the main melody from the Vision Scene of Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty” – Tchaikovsky is not credited – to show Fidolia’s vision of Posy. Although Scarlett Monahan’s callow and petulant Posy is unworthy of such treatment, Tchaikovsky and Salinger/Fidolia breathe such rapturous beauty into Posy’s ballet training that it’s hard not to believe Posy has the ballet talent she all too patently hasn’t.
@Alastair Macaulay, 2025