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It is harder for contemporary playgoers to move beyond gender and psychological readings and to reengage with allegories of civic virtue and republicanism. Most of those I spoke to after the performance found it hard to respond to such a virtuous and pious female figure as Lucretia.
Collatinus and lucretia full#
In a week full of Senate action and plebiscite talk we are struck by how present the afterlife of Roman law and civic structures are in our contemporary world. It was a classic piece of Brechtian alienation. For instance as Collatinus (Jeremy Kleeman), lay on the ground as a sleeping Lucretia, the allegory of civic virtue as some sort of otherworldly effigy became more present than the real gendered psychological character. The allegorical understanding of the themes became clearer as they became rationally things to be read rather than experienced embodied in a beautiful actor’s body. The voices, in a way, separated from the body of the singer, became more sublimely uncoupled. Still, far from merely deconstructing gender, the move created many interesting corollaries. So, for example, Tarquinius was sung by baritone Nathan Lay in a violently charged and forceful voice - but, like a ventriloquist, he stood or shadowed Jessica O’Donoghue who drag kinged the prince’s part (and who also played Bianca).įrom left to right: Nathan Lay, Jessica O Donoghue and Andrew Goodwin in The Rape of Lucretia. In a bold deconstruction, for much of the opera each character was played by another actor (of the opposite sex). However Kip William’s direction amplified the crystalline abstraction of the original, even further. Sung beautifully and with considerable power and dynamism by Anna Dowsley, in the Sydney production, Lucretia was entirely believable as a beautiful and chaste vision. The music assists in asserting the true virtue and love of Lucretia and Collitanus. In Britten’s original work, there is some level of ambivalence. The music adds to the Christian overtones by using sacred forms, especially for the chorus’s interludes, some of the most beautiful music in the opera. Duncan adds a female and male chorus that, over the drama, highlights Jesus’s suffering as the way to grace and rebirth. If there is hope in this work it comes from an overlaying of Christian iconography and sound types: chorales, hymns and lullaby. When Tarquinius climactically enters her chamber in Act II, Lucretia lets slip, “In the forest of my dreams/You have always been the Tiger.” But the allegory of pure chastity and beauty becomes a more erotic and psychological battle. So outraged is everyone that they vow to overthrow the kings for good.ĭuncan saw in the myth a particular intertwining of life and death, the Spirit and Fate Lucretia represents the former, Tarquinius the latter. Collatinus returns to a shameful Lucretia who kills herself in an act of self-sacrifice and redemption. Tarquinius decides to find the famed Lucretia while her husband is away and rapes her. All their wives have been tested and found wanting and only Lucretia is found to be chaste. Britten and Duncan agreed on a cast of eight and an orchestra of 12, in a form they dubbed “chamber opera.” It tells the story of Lucretia, a Roman noblewoman who is married to Collatinus, and opens with the men away in camp, including the Prince Tarquinius. The opera is written to be austere and crystalline and to follow the neatness and efficiency of modernist design. What makes the staging contemporary is an equivocation between insisting on the opera’s allegorical meaning (of civic virtue) and the nagging contemporary doubt that real statescraft and civic sacrifice are at all possible. Under the direction of Kip Williams, the opera is made to resonate in a different way, moving from ancient Roman allegory to contemporary hip hop styling. In this production, the Sydney Chamber Orchestra and Victoria Opera take this abstract and fragmented work and break it further. The Rape of Lucretia by Benjamin Britten and librettist Ronald Duncan is an avant-garde piece of modernism.