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.

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Thematically it works well enough (though I’m not convinced we gain much in the updating), but visually it’s all a little predictable. If the ‘blessed springtime’ of earth is indistinguishable from the caverns of the underworld then what is Orfeo fighting so hard to regain? This is not only the first time that an opera has been staged at the Roundhouse and the beginning of an ongoing collaboration with the Royal Opera, but also Boyd’s first foray into opera and — unaccountably — the company’s first-ever staging of the work. There is everything to play with and for, and yet there’s a lack of energy, of invention, that saps emotion from a strong cast.

For all its acoustic difficulties, the potential of the space is enormous. Underused here, the opportunities for action on multiple levels, endless entry and exit points, and its giant circular stage promise much for the future.