Cliché, cynicism and a car-crash finale: Royal Opera’s Jephtha reviewed

London’s two opera houses have been busy staging non-operas. Handel’s English oratorio, Jephtha, is his final exercise in a form that only existed because it was, explicitly, not opera (Georgian theatres needed something to play during Lent). We know better today, and dramatised reboots of Handel oratorios are proliferating, possibly because – unlike his actual operas – they give the chorus something to do. Katie Mitchell directed Theodora at Covent Garden last year. Now Oliver Mears has had a bash at Jephtha and has encountered the same basic problem. Operas seduce; oratorios preach. These are explicitly Christian, implicitly patriotic works, and what self-respecting contemporary director could allow that?

It’s clear from early in Mears’s staging that he lacks the vocabulary – and possibly the will – to make historical or human sense of this particular story. True, Old Testament morality can be a little on-the-nose, and you can appreciate why a director might want to tease out some complexity. But Mears simply inverts good and bad and imposes a funkier set of moral binaries. (In that respect, at least, it’s very much a Jephtha for the modern day). The wicked Ammonites are portrayed (briefly) as Hogarthian hipsters, a colourful bunch who are totally cool about cross-dressing. The Israelite Jephtha (Allan Clayton) is the bullying, misogynistic leader of a Puritan sect from an earlier century, or possibly just from Channel 4. The libretto refers to Gilead, so the women all wear Handmaid’s Tale bonnets. We could do with a moratorium on that particular cliché.

In fairness, it’s superbly realised. Simon Lima Holdsworth’s designs are imposing: massive stone slabs inscribed with Biblical texts frame the action and tower over the characters, by turns brooding or fiery under Fabiana Piccioli’s lighting.