Caius Gabriel Cibber’s statues of ‘Melancholy’ and ‘Raving Madness’, their eyes staring blindly into the void, petrified in torment, once posed on top of the gate to Bedlam. In 1739, when Handel’s dramatic oratorio Saul was first performed, you could pay a modest fee to pass beneath them and gawk at the living spectacles within, victims of ‘arbitrary passions’ including pride, lust and envy.
In Barrie Kosky’s Glyndebourne staging of Saul, Cibber’s archetypes are animated and given voice by Christopher Purves as the king driven mad by ‘Envy! Eldest born of Hell!’ Saul was the second of Handel’s great studies of madness. But where Orlando (1733) proposes a cure, restoring the hero to his senses after a sequence of florid scenes of delirium, Saul ends in disgrace, defeat and death. In Acts 1 and 2, Kosky’s Israelites jabber and point like Bedlam’s Georgian tourists. They’re half-crazed by the opulent spoils (Dutch-Flemish floral arrangements, stuffed swans and peacocks, the smooth flanks of slaughtered deer) of their victory over the Philistines and the grotesque totem of the head of Goliath (designs by Katrin Lea Tag).
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