Powder Her Face review – Made memorable by Roocroft's duchess

Opera

Powder Her Face Ambika P3, London ★★★★★

During an earlier part of her lengthy career as a celebrity, Mrs Sweeny, who would subsequently become Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, was rhymed with Mussolini in the 1934 Cole Porter song, You're the Top. Since 1995, however, her musical identity has been primarily associated with Thomas Adès's opera to Philip Hensher's satirical libretto, which focuses on the duchess's later years and especially her extremely public disgrace as a result of a notorious divorce case centring on her sexual behaviour.

English National Opera presents this modern classic in a vast hall in Marylebone, where the audience for Joe Hill-Gibbins' production is arranged on three sides of a central performing space like members of an enormous jury; on the fourth side is placed the instrumental ensemble, plus conductor Timothy Redmond, who steers the music with panache as well as efficiency. The venue, though, has an over-resonant acoustic that dissolves too many of the sung words.

Yet Hill-Gibbins and his designer Ultz tell the louche tale of the duchess's downfall with clarity and lashings of appropriate period detail; photographs relayed on screens remind us not only of specific dates within a narrative that moves backwards and forwards, but also of the means by which her reputation was ruined.

It's a piece that can seem clever but heartless – and clever it undeniably is, with Redmond here highlighting the multiple parodies and references Adès's score indulges in. What makes this staging truly memorable, though, is the extraordinary portrait of the duchess offered by Amanda Roocroft, whose richly imagined performance lends a generally unsympathetic character a surprising degree of pathos and vulnerability. She also sings the role with admirable lyrical breadth, impeccably supported by Clare Eggington's Maid, Alexander Sprague's Electrician and Alan Ewing's Hotel Manager, all three of whom manage their various alternative identities with complete perspicacity.