UK Edition
Review
Saul review, Glyndebourne: an electrically imaginative, viscerally gripping production
To get a sense of the genius of Barrie Kosky’s astonishing production of Handel’s oratorio Saul, you need only consider what he does with its first 20 minutes.
Ignoring that tired vogue for animating overtures with a dumb show, he leaves the audience in slowly encroaching darkness, staring at a blank drop curtain as the music trundles on its merry baroque way.
But gradually Goliath’s enormous severed head become visible downstage and, as the curtain rises, the half-naked blood-smeared figure of David the giant slayer advances towards it out of the gloom.
Then pow! – well, I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but believe me, what happens is heart-stopping.
With its connotations of the decorously static and churchy, oratorio is not a word or a genre that interests Kosky: instead he mines a thrillingly fluid, psychologically acute narrative out of the sacred text and moulds it into physically vibrant, emotionally gripping theatre.
Purists may throw up their hands in horror at the interpolated shrieks and wails or the exuberant showbiz glitter that accompanies some of the choral rejoicings; the prim may also squirm at David and Jonathan’s one awkwardly erotic embrace and the milky discharge from the Witch of Endor’s withered dugs. But I defy even the most straitlaced and literal-minded not to be viscerally gripped by such electrically imaginative drama.
This is the third time I have seen this staging, and it loses none of its vitality on repeated encounters. Rehearsed by Kosky himself, it has a brilliant precision, and a largely new cast brings fresh energy to it, galvanised from the pit by Laurence Cummings and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
Markus Brück is poor schizophrenic Saul, raging one moment, piteous the next; Iestyn Davies and Allan Clayton are both in superb voice as David and Jonathan (Davies’s rapturous rendering of the sublime “O God whose mercies numberless” was a musical highlight of the evening); Anna Devin and Karina Gauvin have many fine moments as the rival sisters Michal and Merab; and Stuart Jackson multi-tasks with terrific camp flair in four smaller roles.
Star of the show, however, is not a soloist but the all-singing, all-dancing chorus, under its new master Nicholas Jenkins, excelling itself in its exuberant alleluias and the final exhortations to “Gird on thy Sword, Go on” that would have done Theresa May good to hear.
The reception was ecstatic. Tickets still available for some remaining performances – buy buy buy.
Until 25 August, in repertory with with Pelléas et Mélisande and Vanessa. Tickets: 01273 815000 ; www.glyndebourne.com