Fortune/Valletto Alice Coote Virtue/Damigella Julie Unwin Amor Linda Tuvas Ottone Michael Chance Poppea Catrin Wyn Davies Nerone Paul Nilon Arnalta Neil Jenkins Ottavia Sally Burgess Drusilla Linda Kitchen Seneca Gwynne Howell Nutrice/Venus Linda Ormiston Liberto Wynne Evans Lucano/Student Nicholas Sears Mercury/Student Richard Halton Student/Jupiter Philip Daggett Conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini Producer David Alden Co-production with Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich This production has been on with different casts in Munich and at the Salzburg Festival. It's difficult for a director to get Poppea completely wrong, provided the singers are there. The plot and characters are nasty but well-defined, and the music delivers the drama perfectly. You just have to get everybody on-stage in the right costume at the right time. I think David Alden pretty much gets it completely right. The problem is for the audience, who has to decide what to make of it all. There's a circus of divine machinery and low-life characters, though these are entertaining, and familiar enough in themselved from Renaissance drama and other early opera. But the content of the divine allegory (Fortune and Love beat up on Virtue, represented as a pregnant woman using crutches) isn't exactly uplifting, and it is acted out in detail in the plot itself. Poppea, in love with the emperor Nerone, persuades him to divorce his wife Ottavia and to kill the philosopher Seneca, who supports Ottavia. Ottone, Poppea's obsessed ex-husband, accepts the advances of Drusilla, but also agrees under duress from Ottavia to try to kill Poppea, which he does dressed as Drusilla. Amor intervenes, Ottone and Drusilla are exiled along with Ottavia, and Poppea and Nerone triumph. There is lovely music on the side of Poppea and Nerone throughout, but the randy Nurse and Valletto, and Poppea's nurse Arnalta, present parodies of desire and ambition that suggest satire, if you want to find it. Poppea, like Calisto and other early operas, actually shows a detailed grasp of its classical models. The immediate source is the Senecan play Octavia, and the technique of divine-royal-lowlife parallels and transformations is pure Ovid, rhetoric and alienation as entertainment. This is the European baroque proper, rather than the musical baroque, which belongs to the Enlightenment, and which is much more accessible for modern audiences. There isn't a handy modern parallel genre for Poppea, though Brecht, Dallas and I Claudius all provide hints. David Alden's production makes do with the hints, and succeeds amazingly by letting the opera get on with it. The setting is roughly authoritarian-Dallas, with monlithic back walls, ugly modern furniture, and spot-lights. There are the usual seats (a sofa that turns into a bed, and a lawyer's chair), but they are permanently useful in this production. Amor is enthroned on top of a revolving door, a sign that the action is part of a continuing process of entrances and exits into love and power. A Big Brother portrait of Nerone appears in all three acts, and Nerone himself sits in the lawyer's chair watching as Drusilla is arrested. In act 2, Poppea climbs around on the wall (of death) like a slinky spider as she persuades Nerone to kill Seneca. But the characters are central, and the central characters are left in stylized modern dress more or less to get on with it. (I was going to say "human characters", as the comic characters are as inhuman as the gods. There's more than a touch of Kafka here as well.) Paul Nilon, mainly in black silk pyjamas with coloured toga, is soppy about Poppea, and sinisterly opaque when killing people, and sings beautifully throughout. Catrin Wyn Davies looks and sounds seductive, with a collection of movie femme fatale costumes (think Kiss of the spider woman). Sally Burgess, in power suits with metallic touches, is a tougher than usual Ottavia, apparently motivated purely by power, not by love for Nerone. Her farewell to Rome was very moving, perhaps the only hint of sympathy in the work for those who get it in the neck. Gwynne Howell, who is a natural for a dignified, berobed philosopher, was spot on as Seneca as a Soho creative PR type, in amildy contentious characterization. But Seneca is a problem -- everyone from Tacitus onwards hints that he's overdoing the martydom bit, and Valletto's mockery and the jolly polyphony of his students as they try to persuade him to flee make the point here. The divine beings were suitably over the top, mainly in lame and leather, with the prologues on classically-correct enormous platform shoes. Mercury was a mummy, which I can't quite work out -- the conveyer of souls to the underworld, I suppose. Valletto was a Hollywood page, the Nutrice was a nurse with red rubber gloves and an alternative burleque outfit, and Arnalta, done with a fine sense of comedy by Neil Jenkins, was in the Dame Edna tradition, though unmistakeably butch. Michael Chance as Ottone also did splendidly in drag. Ottone is the character who combines practical uselessness and soppiness with moral failure, and he is treated in this production as half-way to being a comic type, though he starts out as a conventional besotted lover. I think this may be the first time I've seen Michael Chance actively engaged in a production, and very funny as well.