Joshua, Opera North, Don Carlo, Royal Opera House

Why stage a Handel oratorio, or anyone else’s for that matter? The recent urge to do it, with Bach’s Passions — even, I’m told, with Messiah — suggests a further incursion of TV into our lives, the inability to absorb anything that isn’t partly or primarily visual. At least Handel’s Joshua, which Charles Edwards directs and designs in a new Opera North production, is bellicose so there is a fair amount of action, though the most indelible parts of it are the choruses, some of them, strangely, sung with scores in hand, some not.

The setting is post-second world war, yet another production with an excuse for dressing the characters in dowdy clothes suggestive of a Ken Loach movie. There’s a conflict between what we see and the long and excellent programme note in which Ruth Smith argues that Handel’s contemporaries wouldn’t have given the Jews a second thought, but would have taken the whole story, including the Ark of the Covenant, to be symbolic of crises that Great Britain was passing through in the early 18th century.