Denial has rarely looked so good

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.