Ceci n’est pas une Partenope. Forget the warring classical kingdoms of Naples and Cumae: this is surrealist Paris in the 1930s and imminent invasion is the stuff of conversational parenthesis, barely worth interrupting a rubber of bridge for, let alone an embrace. Man Ray, Lee Miller and their androgynous associates slink and affect their way around a monochrome salon with its suggestively curved central staircase, offering up the performance of themselves as a living exhortation to make art, not war.
As a response to Handel’s most Shakespearean of comedies, Christopher Alden’s production is inspired — more now, if anything, than in 2008 when it was new. There’s a new kinship, a self-reflexive friction to watching these languid baroque Charlestons as our own world dances closer and closer to the brink.
Denial has rarely looked so good or pulsed with such a genuinely erotic charge. The gender-bending of Handel’s original prompted one contemporary to dismiss its heroine as a role ‘only fit for… some He-She-thing or other’. It’s a discomfort Alden seizes on, celebrating and amplifying it in the sensual play of his characters, their desires as deliciously ambiguous as the nude cubist collage that Emilio (an excellent Rupert Charlesworth) creates — a faceless play of flesh, interrupted only by a single nipple. Point made.
But if Andrew Lieberman’s gorgeous designs have a strong Parisian accent, and Christian Curnyn’s pit is all thrusting Italianate swagger, Amanda Holden’s translation is earthily Anglo-Saxon, fuck-and buggering its irreverent and witty way through a plot with added toilet humour (a nod, surely, to Man Ray’s friend and collaborator Duchamp) and some giddy cross-dressing. It’s exhilarating stuff, and a reminder of how rarely ENO really takes dramatic advantage of its opera-in-English policy.
When a plot is as frothy as Partenope’s you need some pretty sparkling performances to keep things buoyant.
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