★★★★☆
Perhaps more nights at the opera ought to have a cliffhanger ending so that you’re forced to buy a ticket to the next night. This is the approach that English Touring Opera has taken in its baroque season, in which Handel’s 1724 masterpiece is being performed uncut. With every character on stage, from queen to lackey, given his or her full allocation of arias, it has become two full-length evenings; the first dubbed The Death of Pompey, the second Cleopatra’s Needle. On Saturday you can see the first part as a matinee and the second in the evening.
Handel’s audience wouldn’t have balked at the full-length challenge, but then again they would have been in and out of their boxes during a