To the left: a tiled hot tub and mini colonnade. To the right: a show-home bar with felt-tip bright cupboard doors. Artificial grass fills the gaps. Welcome to Studio 3 at Olympus TV, home of Jupiter & Juno – reality television for those convinced The Only Way Is Ancient Rome. Or at least it was, until Juno storms off Love Island, leaving Jupiter without a co-star and the show’s producers with plummeting ratings.
That’s just the first few minutes of Rameau’s Platée in Louisa Muller’s new production for Garsington Opera. Rameau’s overture becomes the show’s title sequence (cue lurid graphics featuring posing deities, airbrushed clouds, gold horses). As played by the English Concert under conductor Paul Agnew, it’s a neat fit – Rameau’s fragmentary phrases crisp and taut, every bit the countdown to curtain-up.
In fact Muller’s conceit works like a fever dream through the first half, making near-miraculous sense of Rameau’s 1745 plot-within-a-plot. The raw materials are not for the faint-hearted. At its core, Jupiter is fed up with Juno’s jealousy, so a demi-god cooks up a plan that Jupiter should pretend to fall for the vain marsh-nymph Platée – a figure so obviously unsuitable (not least because she is cast as a high tenor) that Juno will be taught a lesson.
Turning this into a plan devised by a crew clad in athleisure-wear as the latest love-to-loathe-it reality TV gambit makes it much easier to swallow – for a while. Robert Murray and Henry Waddington are a delight to watch as seedy execs, elegantly dispatching Rameau’s ornamentation and finding a natural home for 18th-century French among the coffee cups and beanbags. The chorus is superb – diction chiselled, phrasing in high-definition – and they move with enviable ease. Yes, their lads’-night-out shrieking over a sheep-race (you had to be there) obliterated the orchestra, but the energy was irresistible.
The problem is the second half. The plot slows. Indeed, delay is the point: Jupiter (a gloriously stentorian sing’n’pose act from Ossian Huskinson) mustn’t actually marry Platée before Juno arrives. And at that point the physical comedy gets desperate: an inexplicable scramble to eat wedding cake; a chorus that keeps falling asleep in sync. Mireille Asselin’s lengthy turn as arch-entertainer La Folie was underpowered. I lost track of which plot-level we were in and gradually stopped caring.
At the centre of it all, mercifully, was a captivating performance by Samuel Boden. His Platée went from an also-ran in a swimwear contest (1950s swim cap, flippers, goggles), to a clown-style makeover for her “wedding”. Yet Boden’s singing was rarely cartoonish. His high register was beautiful – his rare lyrical moments achingly so – even while he flopped and tumbled on stage. The opera’s “happy ending” is heartbreaking – made as cruel here as it could be. Or is that just showbiz?
