Saved by the chorus

We’ve cried wolf with Handel. Ever since the modern trend began for staging the composer’s oratorios we’ve hailed each one in turn as the composer’s ‘most dramatic’. We’ve said it of Theodora, Saul, perhaps loudest (and most persuasively) of Jephtha. The trouble is that now, nearly 40 years since we last saw Belshazzar on an English stage, this magnificent drama of warring armies and nations, grieving parents and defiant children returns and we’ve spent all our superlatives. So you’ll just have to trust me when I say that it’s really quite good.

A narcissistic sybarite of a king rules over a land bloated with corruption, rife with factions. You’d have to try pretty hard to miss the resonances of Handel’s biblical drama, yet somehow director Daniel Slater does exactly that in an awkward contemporary staging that feels mired in the literal. Handel’s opera may flirt with the exotic east, but it’s only window-dressing.