Alcina review – Handel’s opera of sex and sorcery comes alive in vivid staging

Royal Opera House, London This revival of Richard Jones and Antony McDonald’s 2022 staging has kept most of its excellent original cast Lisette Oropesa is imperious and gleaming as the enchantress Alcina Handel, but make it fun.

Perhaps that was Richard Jones’s brief for his production of Alcina, first seen here in 2022 and revived by Sarah Fahie, its original movement director.

And of all Handel’s operas perhaps it’s this one, with its desert-island storyline of sorcery and sex – what happens on the island stays on the island – that invites this treatment.

Jones makes the “good guys” into members of a kind of puritan cult, so the tension between the moral world and the sensual, instinctive one is less of a gentle pull, more a tug of war.

Alcina’s prisoners are transformed by a squirt of her eponymous perfume into birds and animals – a parrot, a mandrill, a King Charles spaniel, all wearing prosthetic heads so beautifully made that for the past year or two they have been in display cases in the Royal Opera House foyer.

The animals are kept busy fawning over Alcina or moving Antony McDonald’s sets around: there’s a huge bed, a greenhouse and an enchanted forest on wheeled platforms, found behind the doors of what might be a hotel corridor.

It’s a wide stage, and there’s often at least one singer running across it.

Amid all this, the opera’s moments of warmth, insight and introspection risk getting lost or at least overshadowed.

It’s brittle, but it is entertaining.

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