© Camilla Greenwell
Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia is the first work to which he applied his term ‘chamber opera’. With an English libretto by Ronald Duncan that is based on André Obey’s play Le Viol de Lucrèce, the piece premiered at Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 1946 and was seen there again in 2015 following the development of a touring version in 2013. It is set towards the end of the sixth century B.C. during the reign of the seventh and final King of Rome Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, who is viewed as an ‘Etruscan upstart’ who murdered his way to the throne. To mask troubles at home he has waged war with Greece, but no actual fighting is currently taking place. Instead, his son Sextus Tarquinius is camped outside Rome with the generals Collatinus and Junius, passing the time by drinking.
The previous night a group of soldiers rode back to Rome to discover that all of their wives were betraying their husbands, with the exception of Collatinus’s wife Lucretia. Junius, distraught at his own spouse’s behaviour, ends up goading young Tarquinius into testing Lucretia’s chastity himself. Tarquinius immediately heads to Rome, enters Lucretia’s house and rapes her during the night. The following morning a broken Lucretia sends for her husband and tells him what has happened. Though he tries to comfort her, she feels she will never be clean again and stabs herself to death, while Junius plans to use Tarquinius’s crime to incite rebellion against the King.
Anne Marie Stanley (Lucretia) Jolyon Loy (Tarquinius), ROH The Rape of Lucretia © Camilla Greenwell 2022
As its Director of Opera, this is Oliver Mears’s first production, which represents a joint venture between the Royal Opera and Britten Pears Arts, in the Royal Opera House’s smaller Linbury Theatre. With the space proving to be of an ideal size for the work, Mears, who sets the drama broadly in the modern day, cleverly draws parallels between Ancient Rome and now, while also imbuing the piece with contemporary concerns. All of the action takes place in a standard living room, courtesy of designer Annemarie Woods, suggesting how it is open for the worst tragedy to befall any of us in our normal, everyday lives. Britten includes a Male and Female Chorus, each of whom is an individual person, with the Male narrating the thoughts of the men in the drama and the Female the women. At the start they sit on the sofa in this living room clutching a picture of Lucretia as if they are parents mourning the loss of their child.
The camp where Tarquinius, Collatinus and Junius are based is also portrayed in this same basic space although it is made to feel much starker. Here, Tarquinius pins a feature from a newspaper entitled ‘At Home with Lucretia’ on the wall. This ties in with the idea in the opera that news of her virtue has spread, and when we first see Lucretia at home with her nurse Bianca and maid Lucia the words they sing are to an interviewer and cameraman. There are a host of other effective touches so that when Tarquinius appears in the house he looks like a menacing giant because the entrance arch he stands beneath is exactly the same height as him while Lucia, who is shorter anyway, stands a little way behind to emphasise the difference even further.
While in the original Lucretia offers Tarquinius a room for the night, as she feels obliged to do, before retiring to her own, here she gives him hers and sleeps on the sofa in the living room instead. Again, this change reflects the modern setting for, while the house of a general in Ancient Rome would automatically have rooms for guests, that is not necessarily the case today when many might still live quite modestly. It means that the rape scene itself takes place in the living room, and, though it is not particularly explicit, it is certainly intense as it is hard to imagine it being rendered any more powerfully.
Prior to this towards the start of Act II we see Tarquinius in a tormented state that, on some level at least, calls to mind Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Deceptions’. In this production he appears again in the final scene because, while he would not physically be present, once he has committed his vile act Lucretia can never be rid of him. After she commits suicide, Junius takes photographs of her to use as propaganda against Sextus Tarquinius and Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, as he seeks to inspire rebellion against the latter. That he actually moves her body into a more ‘photogenic’ pose is revealing of how the modern media can manipulate events, and of just how deep Junius is burying his own guilt, having helped encourage Tarquinius to act as he did in the first place.
Anne Marie Stanley (Lucretia)ROH The Rape of Lucretia © Camilla Greenwell 2022
The evening’s musical credentials are exceptionally strong, with the Aurora Orchestra, under the baton of Corinna Niemeyer, producing an extremely accomplished sound. The performances from the young cast, all off whom are either Britten Pears or Jette Parker Young Artists, are uniformly stunning, and while the singers have the advantage of not having to project in the same way as they would in the main house, this should take nothing away from just how tremendous they sound. Anne Marie Stanley is a particularly persuasive Lucretia who possesses a rich, yet nuanced, tone that highlights every ounce of her virtue and vulnerability, while the baritone of Jolyon Loy’s Tarquinius and bass of Anthony Reed’s Collatinus are highly engaging. Kieran Rayner as Junius, Carolyn Holt as Bianca and Sarah Dufresne as Lucia are equally superb, while the voices of Michael Gibson and Sydney Baedke as the Male and Female Chorus respectively frame the drama extremely well as they provide a Christian perspective on events that took place five hundred years before Christ’s birth. All in all, there really is nothing in this production that is not of the highest quality.
By Sam Smith
The Rape of Lucretia | 13 - 22 November 2022 | Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
the 15 of November, 2022 | Print
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