Orpheus, Shakespeare's Globe, review: 'Purgatorially tedious in performance'

Background reading made this sound as though it should be so interesting and charming that I am positively shocked at myself for finding it so purgatorially tedious in performance.

No reflection on the excellent musicians involved or the adequate production - it’s just that neither the music nor the drama offered me anything viscerally engaging.

The historical significance of Orpheus (or Orfeo as it was originally known) is doubtless considerable. First performed at the Palais Royal in Paris in 1647, it ranks as the first opera composed in France, albeit with a score and libretto written by foreigners: Luigi Rossi  (music) and Francsco Buti (poet) had been imported from Rome by top banana Cardinal Mazarin, who decided that the court of the juvenile Louis XIV needed an injection of Italian cultural glamour.

The first performance was a mighty spectacular affair, combining elements of native masque - formal dances, magical stage effects, sumptuous décor - with the new style of aria and recitative. Its success would sow the seeds for the growth of a distinctively French style of opera, tragédie lyrique, perfected later by Lully and Rameau.

All this is fascinating on paper, but it does not make Orpheus a living artistic experience nearly four centuries later.

Rossi and Buti emerge only as baroque hacks, cookie-cutting out of the clichés of Venetian opera, and neither the unadventurous vocal lines nor the small string orchestra and continuo yield a single memorable or moving episode.

The plot follows the familiar outline, fleshed out with the insertion of a rival for Eurydice’s hand and some tiresome secondary comic characters, who thanks to Christopher Cowell’s translation draw a cheap chuckle from the audience by talking about “sodding bastards” and so forth.

Along the way, there are some pleasant interludes - an elegant trio for Three Graces, for example or Eurydice’s dying lament - and Rossi and Buti clearly knew exactly what formula to follow in a Broadway musical fashion.

But if one thinks of the magnificence, intensity and concision of Monteverdi’s treatment of the Orpheus legend, written a generation previously, then Rossi and Buti’s version seems hopelessly pallid and prolix in comparison, with Orpheus himself a mere cipher and the choral element banal.

Perhaps it could all seem more vivid in a larger (and more comfortable space) than that provided by the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a candle-lit replica of a Jacobean indoor theatre that is probably a third of the size of the splendid salle at the Palais Royal for which Rossi and Buti conceived the work.

Here in Blackfriars everything is cramped, the wooden acoustic unresonant and the stage only capable of delivering rather prosaic special effects.

The director Keith Warner has done his level best, clothing the cast in handsome Caroline garb and keeping everyone moving briskly and brightly, but it all seems rather flat-footed: nothing enchants or surprises.

In the gallery, Christian Curnyn conducted musicians of his Early Opera Company from the harpsichord: they are very accomplished. Victim of a throat infection, Mary Bevan gallantly mimed the title role (originally intended for a soprano castrato), while at short notice Siobhan Stagg sang her music prettily above the stage.

Louise Alder is a winning Eurydice, and Graeme Broadbent, Mark Milhofer and Philip Smith camp it up as the comic and grotesque villains, lechers and senior citizens.  

But the evening’s most distinguished performance came from the Australian mezzo-soprano Caitlin Hulcup as Orpheus’ rival Aristaeus (another castrato role): his-her mad scene after Eurydice’s death brought an otherwise absent note of emotional urgency to the proceedings and momentarily made me feel that the opera had something sincere to communicate.  

Box office 020 7304 4000, www.roh.org.uk Until 8 November