With its poetic take on sexual violence, Britten’s 1946 chamber opera can be accused of idealising the unacceptable. That’s certainly not the case with Talia Stern’s masterful punch-in-the-gut production for British Youth Opera. Playing to an audience of 64, all within touching distance of a viscerally presented act of rape, the effect was physically shattering.
The opera is staged in Brunel’s Thames tunnel shaft, the original entrance to what in 1843 became the world’s first tunnel under a navigable river. Sunk into the ground and just 50ft in diameter, its smoke-blackened walls lend it the claustrophobic feel of a bunker in a modern war zone. Stern uses its stairs and platforms superbly, while Hazel McIntosh’s timeless costumes and simple raised dais locate the action anytime within the last 100 years.
Britten uses two singers, a Male and Female Chorus, to frame the story. They are Christians, supposedly, looking back 500 years to comment on the overthrow of Rome’s Etruscan monarchy. Whether they are complicit in these tragic events is something that concerns Stern. It’s a focus that whips the rug out from under the opera’s po-faced moralising, turning it into a complex, satisfyingly contradictory and thoroughly contemporary tale. “Is this it all?” the company demands at the culmination of Britten’s final chaconne. “No, it certainly isn’t,” is Stern’s bold reply.
At the centre of the performance is Alexandria Moon’s brave, committed and beautifully sung account of the title role (note, the production’s four performances are double cast). With her warm mezzo, she’s tender and vulnerable, yet there’s a core of steel and she spits out the text like bullets. Thomas Payne, occasionally leisurely but more often rip-roaring, offers sterling support conducting Sinfonia Smith Square.
With his adamantine tenor, Alfred Mitchell makes an unusually chilling Male Chorus. Egging Tarquinius on – at one point he literally rides him to Rome – the growing conflict with Victoria Armillotta’s thrillingly sung Female Chorus is palpable. Tigran Kakhvejyan sheaths his heroic baritone in a velvet glove as a testosterone-charged Tarquinius, with Ross Cumming a clarion, double-dealing Junius and Harriet Cameron a radiant, wide-eyed Lucia. Mica Liberta-Smith and Emmeline Tovey complete a dramatically alert cast.
• At the Thames tunnel shaft, London, until 15 August.
