Handel as Netflix thriller: Royal Opera’s Theodora reviewed

The Royal Opera has come over all baroque. In the Linbury Theatre, they’re hosting Irish National Opera’s production of Vivaldi’s 1735 carnival opera Bajazet; unsurprisingly, its first appearance at Covent Garden. Upstairs in the big room, they’re doing Handel’s Theodora: premièred at Covent Garden in March 1750 and then ignored by the Royal Opera and its forebears for the next 272 years. In fairness, it isn’t actually an opera. It’s an oratorio, and it was a flop. Handel attributed its neglect to the fact that the story ‘is a virtuous one’, though the music’s emotional appeal is uncompromising, and the basic morality — Christians and virtuous pagans vs a tyrannical Roman governor — is clear-cut.

Well, we can’t be having that — this is 2022, after all. Katie Mitchell’s impressive new staging takes those certainties and blurs and inverts them, tweaking plot and characterisation to convert an 18th-century hagiography into the equivalent of one of those moody, well-reviewed TV thrillers, complete with morally ambivalent anti-heroine, bleak urban settings, and the rumbling threat of telegenic ultraviolence.