Agrippina was the pushy mother whose scheming got Nero on to the imperial Roman throne. Her story, elaborated in Handel's opera, isn't a bundle of laughs. But David McVicar's production, new to ENO but premiered in Brussels in 2000, doesn't let that get in the way.
As in his Glyndebourne Giulio Cesare, McVicar's approach is busy, camp and often irreverent, aided by some choice expletives in Amanda Holden's English translation. Some of that irreverence is inspired, the best of it laugh-out-loud funny - for instance, when Agrippina wrong-foots Poppea by showing up in the same frock, or when Poppea and Otho find themselves drowning their sorrows at the same 1990s hip bar to the strains of a chain-smoking lounge harpsichordist. These moments help get us through an opera that lasts nearly four hours but seems shorter
But the nods to seriousness in John MacFarlane's granite-heavy designs seem just a backdrop, while McVicar gets caught up in gags that sometimes work against the music. The joke - a good one - of Nero fuelling his final showstopper with great lines of marching powder is laboured so much we barely get to notice the vocal fireworks from Christine Rice, whose teenage grunge-boy Nero is eye-rubbingly convincing.
The show is partly a star vehicle for Sarah Connolly, always an outstanding Handel mezzo, here singing a woman for a change. As the machinating, gin- swigging Agrippina, she doesn't disappoint; and yet a slight vocal restraint makes one wonder if perhaps there's something in Handel's male heroes that is her true element.
Lucy Crowe's flirty soprano Poppea is a brilliant ENO mainstage debut, but the young countertenor Reno Troilus is severely overcast as Otho, and everyone could use more orchestral verve than the operatically inexperienced Daniel Reuss conjures from the pit. ENO has inexplicably engaged half a starry cast and left the rest to chance.
· In rep until March 3. Box office: 0870-145 0200
