The Rape of Lucretia – review

The Rape of Lucretia is Britten's problem piece. Viewing a tale of pre-Christian violation through Christian eyes, its amalgam of brutality and moralising, the latter giving rise to theatrical alienation effects, can seem unwieldy. And there is still debate as to whether Britten portrays Lucretia as being attracted to her attacker Tarquinius and therefore in some way "asking for it". Directors have frequently struggled to find responses to the questions raised but not answered by the work. For Fiona Shaw, however, staging the work for Glyndebourne on Tour, its irresolute nature forms the starting point for a major re-examination of its content.

Her first tactic is to dispense with the alienation effects, and to make the Male and Female Choruses (Allan Clayton and Kate Valentine) complicit in the tale they tell. We first find them as archaeologists at an arc-lit dig, where the narrative of the history they literally uncover is coloured by their own relationship. They are possibly married, certainly lovers. She is religious, but begins to question her faith. His apparent levelheadedness is soon undermined by his reckless involvement with the past as he gives Duncan Rock's charismatic Tarquinius a piggy-back during his ride to Rome.

Shaw's other gambit is to give Claudia Huckle's Lucretia and David Soar's Collatinus a daughter, who is terrified by noise during the rape itself and who at the end hovers traumatised and alone by her mother's corpse. In so doing, Shaw is peering beyond Britten to medieval and Renaissance retellings of Lucretia's story in which the ethics of suicide as a response to rape form the dominant issue.

This also exposes, however, a weakness in Shaw's methodology – namely that in order to recontextualise Britten, she has to stray from him. She sees Lucretia's marriage as happily secure, whereas Britten's Collatinus is a smugly proprietorial man, whose dreadful remarks that his violated wife should be "forgiven" for what she has "given" are one further step on the way to her destruction. And her staging of the rape – in which the Choruses, alarmed by what they have unearthed, awkwardly try to bury Lucretia and Tarquinius back in the ground before having consensual sex themselves – is unnecessarily confused.

The performances, though, are terrific. Huckle, infinitely vulnerable, unflinchingly registers Lucretia's agony. Clayton and Valentine are infinitely subtle in their delineation of the Choruses' moral turpitude, while Rock undercuts Tarquinius's raffish allure with unnerving intimations of psychotic violence. It's beautifully conducted by Nicholas Collon, too.