After its huge success with one of Handel’s last English oratorios, Theodora, which Peter Sellars staged in 1996, Glyndebourne has opted for one of the earliest in that sequence. Saul – for director Barrie Kosky’s first show there – could, in its very different way, prove as memorable as Sellars’s production has been.
The contemporary resonances of an Old Testament story dealing with the mental disintegration of an unreasoning Israelite ruler, the defeat of his army and the rebuilding of the nation under a new king are hard to ignore, but Kosky does not set out to preach a political sermon.
Instead, he parcels up the three acts of the original into two parts and, with his designer, Katrin Lea Tag, presents the narrative in a series of vivid, beautifully imaginative stage pictures – brightly coloured in the opening scenes, louring monochromes later – with a riotous collection of wigs and costumes that cheerfully muddle the 18th and 21st centuries.
The score’s great choruses are given extra energy by Otto Pichler’s choreography for a hyperactive dance group, interspersed with moments of blackly surreal comedy.
It is virtuoso stagecraft, given point and pathos by the performances that Kosky gets from the protagonists. Christopher Purves is astonishingly physical in the central role of Saul; he may not have any of the oratorio’s greatest arias, but everything he does is freighted with meaning. The way in which his envy of the triumphant David morphs into murderous hatred is graphically charted right up to his confrontation with John Graham Hall’s pendulous-breasted Witch of Endor, still crazily suckling after all these years.
Iestyn Davies’s ravishingly well-sung, guileless David is Saul’s unwitting enemy, Paul Appleby’s Jonathan the conflicted mediator between them, while Lucy Crowe and Sophie Bevan are the daughters Merab and Michal, with Crowe hardly fazed by the technical hitch that delayed her arrival for her gorgeous aria in the candlelit opening scene of the second part. Ivor Bolton conducts the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with tremendous elan: theatrically and musically, this is one of Glyndebourne’s finest shows of recent years.
- At Glyndebourne, Lewes, Sussex, until 29 August. Box office: 01273 815000.
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