King's Head, London
It's not certain how much of Monteverdi's opera is actually by his own hand and how much is the work of colleagues or assistants; nor do we know what instruments played in the first production in 1642. Any new version thus involves a certain amount of realisation, either improvised in period style or newly composed.
OperaUpClose's staging goes further, adding an "intervention aria" by Michael Nyman. This feels like a digression, getting in the way of the drama as it heads towards the shockingly beautiful final duet between the two most ruthless characters. The remainder of this new version has been arranged by Alex Silverman for jazz trio ? piano, saxophone and bass ? and is not only well done, but proves perfectly apt for the pub-theatre context.
Also matching the venue is the level of vocal and dramatic intensity supplied by a capable cast directed by Mark Ravenhill, who provides a new English version broadly faithful to the original. In this space, grand gestures would look and sound artificial; here there's a degree of truthful intimacy that registers as both natural and immediate. The male-to-female cross-dressing is not played for laughs, and in Katie Bellman's contemporary designs there's a merciful avoidance of the glitzy approach that has reduced some productions to parody.
Not all of the acting is ideally focused, but at best it possesses a quiet integrity that exposes the interiors of some of opera's first great psychological portraits. There's a poisoned grandeur to Rebecca Caine's Ottavia, while the scariness of Jessica Walker's Nero never quite goes away, even in his love scenes with Zo� Bonner's sexually confident Poppea.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/apr/15/coronation-of-poppea-review
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