Joyce DiDonato seduces you within the first 10 minutes: Royal Opera’s Agrippina reviewed

‘Laws bow down before the desire to rule…’ Centuries before ‘proroguing’ had entered British breakfast-table vocabulary there was Handel’s Agrippina, and centuries before that there was the woman herself. Sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius (who she may or may not have poisoned) and mother of Nero (by whom she was eventually executed), Agrippina was a true political animal: instigator, manipulator, machinatrix and far more.

It’s a heady story in prose, so add a bit of poetic licence and a score by the 24-year-old Handel and you have a spicy blend of politics, satire and sex — Succession with a Roman accent.

Let’s pass over the bewilderment that it has taken the Royal Opera more than 300 years to stage the piece and celebrate instead the fact that England’s flagship house has finally arrived at one of Handel’s greatest black comedies, staged here by the Komische Oper’s in-demand artistic director Barrie Kosky.