Glyndebourne: The Rape of Lucretia, review

Fiona Shaw's production of Britten's chamber piece is opera at its most nakedly powerful, says Rupert Christiansen

The Rape of Lucretia: Glyndebourne
An electric shimmer: The Rape of Lucretia

“What is challenging about Lucretia” admits Fiona Shaw in the programme, “is that it’s really hard to find the meaning.”

Or at least one central meaning, one might add. Is the final Christian message genuinely endorsed, or is its invocation of Christ dying for our sins merely a consoling piety? Is rape intended to represent an allegory of evil (the opera was written in 1946), or is obscure guilt related to sexual desire behind it?

Shaw’s superb production of Britten’s chamber opera explores such questions with deeply intelligent ambivalence. In Michael Levine’s simple but beautiful setting, the stage becomes an archaeological site - a bare square of earth which is being excavated to discover ancient truth, its partially covered lineaments pitted with traps and hard to navigate. Nobody can be confident of the ground beneath them.

But Shaw isn’t interested in symbolic abstractions, and she has strimmed away the thickets of poetic verbiage that clog Ronald Duncan’s arch libretto: what she exposes are people in situations all too familiar throughout the Second World War.

The Male and Female Chorus are two figures who might have walked out of Brief Encounter: they regard the drama they witness as their own, with varying levels of detachment and involvement. The Etruscan generals are bloodied squaddies, hammered by battle and drink, and Lucretia is no marmoreal maiden but a young woman shocked at the intensity of her own erotic responses.

The rape is as desperately exciting as its aftermath is desperately sad. Lucretia’s terrified self-loathing isn’t just a matter of feeling defiled: it stems from a realisation that she isn’t the modestly devoted wife she believed she was. A tiger has pounced, and the experience has shattered her ability to love. No amount of Christ can save or alter that.

And Shaw draws magnificent performances from a mostly young cast. The men are just about ideal: Allan Clayton as the Male Chorus, Duncan Rock as the gym-buffed Tarquinius, Oliver Dunn as cuckolded Junius, David Soar as the decent Collatinus. Ellie Laugharne and Catherine Wyn-Rogers play the handmaidens gracefully; Kate Valentine is deeply sympathetic as the pious, anxious Female Chorus; Claudia Huckle’s deeply touching and vulnerable Lucretia needs more vocal power to weather the climaxes.

Nicholas Collon’s crystalline conducting of one of Britten’s most original scores also puts the opera under a forensic light: all the music’s nervous shudder and electric shimmer register at the highest pitch. This is opera at its most nakedly powerful.

Until 26 October, then touring.

Tickets: 01273 815000; (www.glyndebourne,com)