Power play

The distinction between operas and oratorios in Handel’s output is to a large degree an academic affair, depending on such contingencies as whether a work could be staged at a certain point in the ecclesiastical calendar. Glyndebourne showed that Theodora, an oratorio, could be staged with spectacular success, thanks to Peter Sellars’s intermittent genius. A couple of years ago, Welsh National Opera mounted Jephtha, Theodora’s immediate successor, to great acclaim, and that production, by Katie Mitchell, has now reached the Coliseum. If it hasn’t been changed much, I am at a loss to understand why it made such a strong impression in Wales, for it seems to be fundamentally and pervasively flawed in both conception and execution.

The setting of the action is moved from the Middle East in ‘biblical times’ to nowhere in particular in Europe in the 1940s, in a shell-pocked hotel, with the inevitable distraught population rushing on carrying tattered suitcases (but hasn’t that image had its day?), the women wearing those flyaway hats that instantly evoke the time.