If you want a dainty night at the opera, Francesco Cavalli isn’t your composer. Among Italian 17th-century composers he’s still for most audiences a dark horse. But how this horse likes to canter. Last year at Covent Garden, David Alden took La Calisto for a crazy ride; now, Grange Park gives us this brazen Eliogabalo, never produced in the UK before, and never performed anywhere, it seems, until 1999. It is a baroque sex comedy about one of Rome’s most disgusting emperors, fiendishly plotted, scurrilously satirical, and it left me exhausted.
To the Venice authorities who banned it in 1688, Eliogabalo’s antics came too close to the knuckle, sexually, politically or both. But there’s no censor now to stop the director-designer David Fielding from embellishing the script with transgendered pranks, a gents’ washroom, a Coke dispenser, motorbike, yellow sports car and pole-dancing in a Roman Senate reconfigured as a Playboy club.
The sexual confusion is topped off as usual with vocal cross-dressing. Leading male castrato roles are sung by women. The army tough in combat gear is a counter-tenor, and Eliogabalo’s nanny is played in drag. Who’s who, and what’s what? It’s a struggle to find out.
Not a particularly pleasing struggle, either. Alden’s Calisto had its crude romping, but there were always those eye-popping designs. Fielding’s camping — tired, unwitty — unfolds in a sterile space with the charm of a government building in Ceausescu’s Romania. Every twist of sexual ambiguity arrives with a bump, grind and wiggle. From his singing alone, you might really enjoy Tom Walker’s nanny, Lenia, but over time his high-heeled tottering becomes a drag of another kind. As for Eliogabalo, strutting in silver tights, the velvet high mezzo of Renata Pokupic is more pleasing still; quite a star turn, in fact. But that doesn’t make the emperor any nicer.
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Still, there is the music. Though Cavalli lacks Monteverdi’s individuality and depth, his fluid recitatives and arias of emotional anguish are appealing. As the opera’s genuine heroines, Claire Booth, Sinead Campbell-Wallace and Yvette Bonner bear the lyric brunt well, Booth best of all. Ringing commitment also shines from Julia Riley’s Alessandro, while bright elegance marks Christian Curnyn’s pit band of gambas, sackbuts and gut strings — the only period feature in Fielding’s exasperating escapade.
Box office: 01962 737366, to July 5