Royal Opera’s Orfeo, Roundhouse: shouts its agenda so loudly the music struggles to be heard

What a week to stage an opera about art’s power to challenge institutional authority, oppression — even death itself. Orfeo’s weapon might be a lyre rather than a pen, but the metaphor is silhouetted clearly against the monochrome backdrop of the Royal Opera’s new production of Monteverdi’s opera.

Director Michael Boyd, former artistic director of the RSC, has taken a world of nymphs and shepherds and stripped it for conceptual parts. A battle between Gods and men is reinvented as a struggle between individual creative autonomy and faceless obedience to church and state. In Tom Piper’s designs, meadows and bucolic loveliness are out and 24-style metal walkways and gantries are in. The shepherds go from ‘pastori’ to pastors (see what they did there?), while the nymphs and infernal courtiers become business-suited henchmen and women serving glamorous dictator Pluto and his wife sitting high above the stage, all the better to watch the human suffering below.