Based on Shakespeare's tragic poem The Rape of Lucrece, each performance of Wexford Festival Opera's eccentric opera features a different ending. Photo: Padraig Grant
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Accusations in recent years have made looking at art twice a common reflex. Almost 500 years ago, Machiavelli’s satire of Florentine high society La Mandragola had a scene where two lovers get into bed. The woman, young and beautiful in fashionable silk, is nervous with self-doubt. The man is her trusted doctor, covered head-to-toe in black robes, his face red with alcohol.
As they throw the bed-sheets over themselves, it isn’t lost on the audience that the man is actually an imposter in disguise, having conspired with the woman’s close allies to drug her beforehand. Any unease may have been pushed from everyone’s minds by the heavy make-up and broad gags of commedia erudita. Move along folks, nothing to see here.
There was a time when showing images of sexual violence was too disturbing. They were signposted through flashes of melodrama instead. But what if an opera, in this more admissible age, took a rare exception such as Shakespeare’s narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece and deliberately made its violence elusive and difficult to find?
The reflex of Wexford Festival Opera’s new opera What Happened to Lucrece, composed by Andrew Synnott, isn’t to look at this artwork twice but three times. Each streamed performance features a different ending, written to be either tragic, farcical or romantic.
Lucrece (Sarah Richmond) returns home from a corporate job to her modern-day London apartment, an abode made of pink paint and portraits of women in director Rosetta Cucchi’s design. Her artist flatmate Collatine (Kathleen Norchi) is off to the pub but Lucrece decides to stay in and prepare a work presentation, despite a loose acquaintance Sextus (Rory Musgrave) hoping to see her.
As director, some of Cucchi’s decisions are difficult to fathom. Against the palpable unease of Synnott’s music, a satisfying stylish clatter of piano, the cloying jollity of Lucrece and her thoughtful friend Fran (Sarah Shine) emphatically tickling each other and blowing widely on their hot coffees makes for a peculiar blend of tones. It’s hard to believe that the basis for this eccentric opera is a tragic poem about a soldier’s wife getting attacked and raped.
The Rape of Lucrece has found music before. A cabaret adaptation by Camille O’Sullivan gave touching clarity to the poem’s psychological trauma and male violence. It also fell into the trap laid by the poetry's beautified aesthetic for depicting a harrowing assault, and created its own overly attractive images. Rather than repeat such pain and horror, there is something to be said for subversion, for changing Lucrece’s fate.
In this performance the opera ends as a farce. Sextus, sloshed and aggressive, arrives and attempts to manhandle Lucrece. She takes advantage of his drunken confusion and posts compromising photos of him online, which in an age of consent doesn’t feel as clean-cut a revenge. Nor is there anything powerful musically, as Synnott hasn’t written any elevating music for soprano for the standoff.
Towards the end Cucchi’s libretto, co-written by Alessandra Binucci, gathers Lucrece and her friends into a Girl Power declaration to face the dangers of the world together. The experiment in subversion ends catastrophically with cliché. As in times past, images of violence disappear behind the feel-good fronts of uplifting comedy, as if they never happened.
Streaming on RTE.ie/Culture until October 15th.
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