Handel collides with The Wicker Man in Adele Thomas’s production of Semele at Glyndebourne. When we reach the denouement, the eponymous heroine – the mortal mistress of Jove, fatally tricked into demanding he cast off his human disguise and reveal himself in his full, cataclysmic divinity – is immured in a massive wicker effigy of her rival Juno, which goes up in flames as the chorus look on. It’s a striking coup de théâtre in an otherwise somewhat lacklustre staging and a dour take on what is essentially a barbed Restoration comedy.
Handel took as his text a libretto by William Congreve, previously set by John Eccles, about the relationship between desire, ambition and opportunism. Thomas, however, is thinking more in terms of emotional and sexual rebellion, and her Thebes becomes an anonymous modern landscape (it looks like scrubland), where Joélle Harvey’s Semele, already pregnant by Stuart Jackson’s Jove, longs to escape from both the prurient mockery of the community around her and the arranged marriage that her father Cadmus (Clive Bayley) is trying to force her into with Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen’s Athamas.
Mount Cithaeron, where Jove instals her as his mistress with her sister Ino (Stephanie Wake-Edwards) for company, is a bit more lush than Thebes (the grass is longer), albeit hardly, in this instance, the Arcadia evoked in both text and score. We soon, however, begin to understand the ennui that makes Semele an easy prey for the machinations of Juno (Jennifer Johnston) and Iris (male soprano Samuel Mariño), though why the former is got up in what appears to be a traditional costume for Turandot, in an otherwise modern-dress production, is anyone’s guess. The real problem here, however, is Thomas’s frequent misjudgment of the work’s tone: much of this is neither funny nor erotic, and until the mood sours in the final act it ideally needs to be both.
Harvey, however, is impressive in the title role, pushed a bit perhaps in the coloratura of No, no, I’ll take no less, though O sleep, why dost thou leave me is ravishing. Jackson’s Jove, more calculating, less overtly besotted than some, sings Where’er you walk with almost considered seductiveness. Both mezzos are outstanding, with Johnston’s formidable hauteur superbly contrasted with Wake-Edwards’s passionate intensity. Nussbaum Cohen sounds astonishingly beautiful as Athamas, though Mariño disappoints, his voice too small for the venue. In the pit, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment play with impeccable style for Václav Luks, though his conducting seems overly urgent at times, robbing the scene where Semele and Ino listen to the music of the spheres, for instance, of its sublimity. The choral singing, as one might expect, is sensational.
• At Glyndebourne, East Sussex, until 26 August.
