★★★★☆
Coincidence, or serendipity, has brought the Royal Opera’s production of Verdi’s The Sicilian Vespers back to the stage for its first revival just as the V&A hosts the exhibition Opera: Passion, Power and Politics. That show presents opera as a force for shaping political and social trends — and one that soaks up those trends, too. Stefan Herheim’s 2013 production of Vêpres pushes the same buttons. Here we’re asked not just to consider the conflict between the oppressed Sicilians and their cruel French overlords in medieval Sicily, but also the struggle for control in the place where Les Vêpres was born: the Paris Opera in the 1850s.
It’s a lot of baggage for one evening. Factor in an abused corps de ballet who