Glyndebourne delivers a glitzy but baffling Alcina — review

The curtain has gone up on a new variety show. This is Alcina’s Island and its star is a stage goddess from the glory years of the Italian revue. Her bewitching spell is so powerful that it turns her admirers into animals, so men in the audience at Glyndebourne should beware.

The festival has done well with Handel operas in recent years, striking gold with productions as diverse as Giulio Cesare, set during the British Raj, and its eye-popping take on the oratorio Saul. This new production of Alcina is not on that level, though it is only fair to add that the audience whooped and cheered at the final curtain.

The opera was one of Handel’s big successes, throwing in everything to please the Georgian public of 1735 — a star role for a sorceress, a magic island, great arias and a lot of transformations and cross-dressing (a Baroque favourite).

Aside from Alcina turning her lovers into plants, rocks and animals, the plot is a confusing farrago of mistaken identities. Even so, it takes a special talent to deliver an updated version that is even more incomprehensible than the original, as director Francesco Micheli has done here.

His production is set in 1960s Milan, where industrialists escape their daily drudgery at the local variety theatre. Those bedazzled by its star, Alcina, sit in boxes wearing animal masks (that, sadly, is the limit of their transformation).

From there on, Micheli plays with ambiguities, especially theatrical illusion versus reality, and sexual identity. Alcina’s dance troupe includes androgynous sailors, while a joke about loos involves going in one door as a woman and popping out from another as a man (Glyndebourne now sports gender-neutral toilet facilities). At the end, even the hero Ruggiero undergoes a sexual metamorphosis.

Amid all these high jinks, Alcina herself tends to get lost. This is no fault of Jane Archibald, who brings a virtuoso soprano to the role’s coloratura, though the beauty of it dims when she pushes for emotional intensity. Turning Alcina from a deadly sorceress into a mere showgirl has involved the loss of the supernatural power which she uses to destroy lives, and no amount of sparkly costumes (I loved the shipwreck embedded in her huge wig) can compensate for that.

The other big role is Ruggiero, sung by Samantha Hankey (winner of the first Glyndebourne Opera Cup) with much elegance and youthful tone, though the darker corners of the role are left unexplored. Soraya Mafi, as Morgana, gets the hit aria “Tornami a vagheggiar” and makes a sparkling job of it, though she is still better in the lyrical music. Beth Taylor shows an impressive turn of speed in Bradamante’s showpiece arias and Rowan Pierce is delightful as the boy Oberto. Alastair Miles sings a somewhat uneven Melisso. Stuart Jackson’s Oronte might focus less on character and more on singing.

They all benefit from Jonathan Cohen’s alert and lively conducting of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, whooping horns and all. Expect oodles of campery, glitzy visuals and razzamatazz, but be prepared to come out completely befuddled.

★★★☆☆

To August 24, glyndebourne.com