The evening starts with Cole Porter's Love for Sale. It ends with the sublime closing duet from The Coronation of Poppea. In between, Barrie Kosky's witty and moving piece of musical deconstruction uses Porter's often cynical take on modern sex to comment on the savage eroticism of Monteverdi's baroque opera.
Purists may blanch, but I found this production, imported from the Vienna Schauspielhaus, to be a serious work of art rather than a piece of frivolous desecration. Part of the pleasure lies in the interweaving of ancient and modern, and the juxtaposition of two different musical idioms. The allegorical Amor, robustly embodied by Barbara Spitz, is both a 17th-century narrative device and the husky voice of some melancholic Porter numbers.
When Ottone, hired by Nero's wife to kill Poppea, dons a green dress belonging to lady-in-waiting Drusilla, the two of them burst into a rapturous chorus of, "It's delicious, it's delightful, it's delovely." And as Amor, having saved Poppea's life, offers her oral satisfaction while she bathes and another character assiduously masturbates in the shadows, we get a quiet choric reminder that Anything Goes.
It sounds camp and kitschy but Kosky, an Australian iconoclast now based in Europe, clearly has a passion for Monteverdi's opera, which he takes apart and reassembles before our eyes. Four pit musicians, including Kosky himself on piano, offer a compressed version of the original score. Kyrre Kvam and Melita Jurisic capture the dangerous eroticism of Nero and Poppea and sing their immorally beautiful closing duet to perfection. Martin Niedermair conveys the ambivalent sexuality of Ottone, who shares with Euripides' Pentheus a suspicious readiness to rush into drag. But the best performance comes from Ruth Brauer who, as the devoted Drusilla, brings out both the mania and nobility of a woman ready to sacrifice her life for another.
An extraordinary evening that not only opens up a conversation between past and present, but also confirms Jonathan Mills's wish to make Edinburgh a festival of ideas.
