The Coronation of Poppea review – ETO’s gender-fluid staging has fizz but also flaws

Robin Norton-Hale’s new staging of The Coronation of Poppea for English Touring Opera is her first production for the company since her appointment as general director last year. It’s a striking if uneven piece of theatre. She can be insightful in her approach to Monteverdi’s examination of unfettered desire, and she retains the metaphysical overlay that some directors play down. She is less successful, perhaps, when it comes to the opera’s politics. And there are musical inequalities as well.

Norton-Hale pulls the work forward into a stylised present. Rome, designed by Basia Bińkowska, is a place of geometric shapes and abstractions, vaguely suggestive of Italian futurism. The protagonists look chic in haute couture. The gods, slumming it in street clothes (a nice touch), gaze down on, and intervene in, the drama from above, while the planets, spinning out both human and divine destiny, revolve slowly over everyone’s heads.

Norton-Hale makes much of sexual ambivalence and gender fluidity. Martha Jones’s Nero is a glamorous androgyne, while Zahid Siddiqui’s Lucano cross-dresses. Jessica Cale’s Poppea is magnificently self-assured, coolly using her sexuality for her own ends and ambitions, while Kezia Bienek’s Ottavia, less sympathetic than some, gradually loses both control and dignity. Feargal Mostyn-Williams’s Otton (as the name is spelled here) and Elizabeth Karani’s Drusilla are obsessives, each in their own way. Trevor Eliot Bowes’s Seneca observes it all with weary detachment. Some of this impresses, but it also suggests a hermetically sealed world turning in on itself: we have little sense of empire beyond, or of the crucial intersection between desire and power at the work’s centre.

The opera is performed in a new English version by Helen Eastman, using a realisation by Yshani Perinpanayagam, who also conducts. Eastman can be demotic, with the characters singing about pissing and shagging. Perinpanayagam arranges the score for roughly the same forces as Rossini’s La Cenerentola, which accompanies Poppea on the ETO tour. Harp and french horn can be heard among the textures, which at times seem overly thick. Her conducting is on the solid side, too, sometimes short on both energy and languor.

There’s some fine singing, though on opening night Mostyn-Williams sounded somewhat unfocused. Cale spins phrases out with nicely understated sensuality, to which Jones responds with considerable passion. Jones’s duet with Siddiqui at the start of the second half is a highlight. Eliot Bowes is calmly dignified throughout, while Bienek, fierce in rage and scorn, does superb things with Ottavia’s agonised farewell to Rome. Cuts to the score mean we don’t hear quite enough of Karani’s beautiful Drusilla as one might like. It’s a flawed evening, albeit fascinating.