Pleasures are fleeting and we must enjoy them while we may is a sentiment more or less synonymous with anything on the Baroque stage. But rarely is it brought home so poignantly – or so powerfully – as it is in Wexford Festival Opera’s enchanting production of Deidamia, Handel’s story of love, war, vanity and human frailty, and his final opera.
Attempting to dodge the oracle’s prediction that his son Achilles will die in the Trojan War, his father Perseus sends him, disguised as a girl, to hide out with the daughters of Lycomedes, King of Scyros. Lycomedes’ eldest daughter, Deidamia, takes a shine to the undercover warrior and they become lovers. It’s only so long before Achilles must throw off his disguise and face his destiny but until then we can enjoy a blissful hiatus of wit, ingenuity, confusion, innuendo and brazen scene-stealing (of which, more later). With Wexford Festival Opera on rollicking form and Handel’s bravura scoring at its zingiest, thanks to instruments being tuned to a hair-raising 442 Hz, plus a dream cast of singers apparently having the time of their lives to boot, it’s difficult to know how better to spend 150 minutes glued to your seat with your ears pinned well back.
George Petrou achieves a vital synergy as conductor and stage director, underscoring the perennial battle of fate with human will in Ancient Greece with a clever parallel plot involving a present day couples’ holiday: think Love Island for nerds. It’s all sight-seeing, sunsets, soon-forgotten tiffs and sketching until the air raid siren sounds during a museum visit and we are suddenly in a much darker place.
Ancients and moderns share the stage but can’t see each other, resulting in some beautifully timed physical comedy as well as a few thoughtfully choreographed near-misses between worlds that prove disarmingly moving. I could have wept for the glitzy instagram woman who peels off her wig and costume to reveal what’s really underneath while Sophie Junker as Deidamia, anticipating Achilles’ departure, sings “If my fear comes true and I am abandoned…” and that was before seeing several in the queue for the Ladies’ maintaining hope in the face of adversity by carefully retouching their lipstick at half time. Very rarely – and it’s so special when it does – opera can meet you exactly where you are.
Complementing Giorgina Germanou’s gorgeous set design, projections by Arnim Friess beautifully smooth the slippages in the passage of time: Lycomedes – the wonderful Petros Magoulas – passes into an underwater world to sing his aria about the contentment of a life well lived and just as we in the audience are wondering if our own adventures have been sufficient, a holiday-maker arrives in a diving helmet and discovers treasure.
As in 1741, it’s Handel’s audacious demands on the singers, coupled with its theme of gender switching, that make this piece so irresistible. A competition to steal the show is very much written in to the music and sopranist Bruno de Sá, brilliantly cast as Achille, did his utmost: exuberantly camp and with a voice to conjure the gods. Sarah Gilford was irresistibly effervescent as Nerea, and as every older sister knows, when your sibling threatens to pull focus it’s time to stop the clocks with a dazzling rendition of an aria that imitates the song of the nightingale, which the cool-headed Sophie Junker did with knobs on. Countertenor Nicolò Balducci certainly matched de Sá for theatricality and gave some of Handel’s soaring notation an ironic spin as a beleaguered Ulisse.
But all’s not well that ends well: history is a succession of conflicts and if we look either way along the passage of time it’s only too clear that the next one is never far away. The bitter truth illustrated by this production’s final scene is as terrifying as it is unavoidable... and it makes what’s gone before taste all the sweeter.
Eleanor's press trip was funded by Fáilte Ireland
