What price constancy in a society where fidelity is not much prized? Like its immediate predecessor, Peter Grimes, Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia has corruption at its core and a suicide as the only possible outcome. The original setting for the story, using Livy, Shakespeare and, more particularly, André Obey’s 1931 drama as source material, is Rome in 500 before the Common Era. This is a world in which sexual infidelity is the modus vivendi. Britten clearly felt that the ending, as the survivors intone “It is all! It is all!” as a response to the harrowing events, was too drastic. Having witnessed the horrors of Belsen just months before writing this opera, there had to be some measure of comfort. Enter the role of the two Choruses as Christian commentators and the reassurance, voiced in the epilogue, that fallen man can be sustained by Christ.
There’s no escaping the fact that this opera is all about a specific rape. Even though the word is no longer shunned in the way that cancer was once a taboo word, readiness to talk about the violation of a human body (and this applies to both sexes, as Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain made clear a generation ago) has not lessened the agonising consequences. The statistics are shocking: fewer than three per cent of all reported cases in the UK result in charges; the number of convictions is terrifying small; equally troubling are those instances where a man has been wrongly incarcerated for a crime he did not commit.
We’re in a small community theatre with a capacity of just 170, housed in a former Methodist chapel in the leafy surroundings of North London. Eleanor Burke and Alex Gotch’s direction is as bleak and austere as the inner architecture; the lighting is subdued throughout, emphasising the terrors of the night even more strongly. Water is present in strangely symbolic fashion: at the very start the Male Chorus is given a ducking in the large commercial sink placed at the back of the performing space; before Tarquinius rides off to commit the crime, he strips to his underpants and soaps himself all over (when have rapists ever cared about personal hygiene?), pointedly washing his hands Lady Macbeth-like after the deed; and as the sound of dripping water is heard Lucretia chooses her method of suicide. As any schoolchild is taught, water and electricity (here represented by a coiled cable torn from a TV set) do not mix.
Are we supposed to regard the soldiers we see in the first act as interchangeable? Modern-day dress (non-existent uniforms and no weapons either) makes a sameness out of the characters Collatinus, Junius and Tarquinius, with nothing at all to distinguish this Prince of Rome from the others. Are all soldiers, and the young men who represent them here, potential rapists? The way in which the sexual status of women and Lucretia’s chastity is openly discussed leaves little doubt. They all smoke repeatedly (as does Bianca later); in their drunken brawling and wild displays of machismo they give the lie to any idea of military discipline. Britten’s treatment of the voice doesn’t help here either: two baritonal roles and one for a bass make for dark-tinged exchanges with little differentiation.
On the right of the stage there is an assembly of wooden platforms supported by interlocking metal poles. Characters, including the Female and Male Choruses, clamber over them or use them as staging-posts. The highest positions are given over to the scene of Lucretia’s ravishment (not graphically portrayed) and for the Male Chorus’s narration, via a microphone and amplification in the theatre, of Tarquinius’s movement through the house. Apart from a few chairs and five TV screens showing indeterminate static images, the performing space is left bare.
Some of the aspects of the direction strike me as illuminating in terms of characterisation. While Tarquinius is busy pursuing Lucretia, he pulls off her jacket, sniffs it, tries on the two different sleeves before pulling it over his sweater, before removing it ahead of the rape. During the crime he has pulled off a brooch that Lucretia is wearing and then casts his trophy with a loud clatter into an empty bucket. Later, Lucretia is armed with dustpan and brush to sweep up the discarded and withered flowers. As she forces the brush ever more vigorously over the floor, this displacement activity reveals the scale of her trauma. Rather like norns in the gloom, Lucretia’s two companions, Bianca and Lucia, endlessly fold, unfold and fold again items of clothing.
The two Choruses carry not only the weight of the narration but in the epilogue represent the purifying effect of catharsis. How far this can be linked to Christian ideas of forgiveness and ultimate redemption in our secular age is one of the many unanswered questions Britten throws up. For him, moral ambiguity and the uncertainty of certainty were always central preoccupations. Olivia Rose Tringham was a highly dramatic and forceful Female Chorus with a bright and clear top line, who owned the space she was given. Words were sometimes spat out like bullets, heightening the dramatic momentum, though in the female quartet towards the end of Act 1, she tended to dominate her colleagues. When Tarquinius appears at the Collatinus household a short time later, still only wearing his underpants, and bangs on a metal pole to signal his arrival, Tringham’s rich and warm chest register brought a delicious sense of irony in the reference to “Prince of Rome”. Daniel Gray Bell as the Male Chorus made good use of his vocal flexibility, his lyrical tenor line giving point and emphasis to lines such as “Violence is within us all” (shades of Lord of the Flies?) at the start of Act 2. Earlier, in Act 1, his repeated soft utterances of Lucretia’s name were particularly effective.
It struck me that the three male characters, so brash and almost adolescent in their demeanour in Act 1, had visibly matured by the moment of their appearances in Act 2. Collatinus, still one of the lads at the start, became more of a credible, caring husband. Oleksii Zasiadko’s portrayal was much warmer as he tenderly embraced Lucretia following her confession, and though his powerful bass voice carried authority I found the intrusive vibrato occasionally bothersome. The part of Junius is for a lighter baritone range, and here Maximilian Catalano delivered all the elements of lyricism without quite revealing the darker sides of the character. It is, after all, his fury at learning of his wife’s own infidelity which spurs Tarquinius on. What of Tarquinius himself? How far is his willingness to commit rape simply a sign of his superior social standing and the assurance that he can take whatever he wants with impunity? Or is it an expression of the young male’s readiness to play with fire and put to the test Lucretia’s sanctified status? As this character Stephen Whitford had an air of boyish insouciance about him, singing his role confidently, but the characterisation oscillated somewhat. Were there really qualms in the soft and beautiful way in which he called to Lucretia to wake up? Was there a purely erotic charge in his fingering of her clothing before singing of “cherries on your lips” and forcing himself upon her? I could imagine a skilful lawyer arguing that he was not much more than a mixed-up kid from an indulgent home without any clear moral compass. History, of course, revealed otherwise: the downfall of the Etruscan monarchy in Rome and any prospect of personal rule by Tarquinius.
Lucretia’s two companions come into their own in Act 2. Nikki Martin’s high-lying soprano as Lucia and Mia Serracino’s warmer mezzo were well contrasted, the former envying her mistress for the model of a perfect marriage, and the latter in protective mode regretting she was never her mistress’s mother. As dawn approaches they both sing “What a lovely day it is”, unaware of the heavy irony, while their florid lines and coloratura displays are set against the harrowing events that have just unfolded. Lucretia was, for me, two quite different characters before and after the interval. Earlier, she had been virtually zoned out, often staring into space absent-mindedly, with little sense of the integrity and dignity that define her. When Bianca addresses her as “my child” in Act 1, that seemed to set the seal on a role that was also vocally withdrawn. “How cruel men are to teach us love” could have been delivered with more than a passing feeling of regret. In Act 2, however, Emma Roberts came alive. The way she resisted Tarquinius physically and passionately opposed his physical advances was as persuasive as her sustained feeling of anguish after the deed itself, using the mellow mezzo range to very expressive effect.
Yet here too Britten injects a degree of ambiguity into the aftermath. Is her suicide merely a result of shame at the destruction of her marriage by Tarquinius? After all, Collatinus is there to offer support and forgiveness. Or is it, in the words of archetypical rapists of yesteryear, a case of “She was asking for it”? Was Lucretia complicit in what ultimately happened to her? If she hadn’t been so emotionally involved, she wouldn’t have felt so guilty after the rape. The brilliance of Duncan’s libretto lies in the fact that there are no clear-cut answers.
The Rape of Lucretia was Britten’s first chamber opera, written – out of a sense of need – for just eight characters and thirteen instrumentalists. A large measure of the musical success of this HGO project is due to the strongly projected conducting of Oliver Cope and his excellent coordination of players and singers. Cope’s ensemble was placed on the left of the performing space, so that every note and every chord registered with impressive immediacy. Again and again I marvelled at the miracles of Britten’s orchestration: the scurrying of the strings in moments of agitation, the whining and groaning of the woodwind to add colour, including their bird-like calls towards the end, the sharp and quite savage chords of exclamation, the ear-teasing repeated flurries of notes from the harp, acting almost as a leitmotif, the deeply moving lament for cor anglais and strings, and the rumble of soft timpani at the very end. Britten always knew what he was doing. For him music was clarification: “My technique is to tear all the waste away; to achieve perfect clarity of expression.” This opera stands as an exemplar of his art.
Alexander Hall
The Rape of Lucretia
An opera in two acts by Benjamin Britten to a libretto by Ronald Duncan, Op. 37
A Hampstead Garden Opera production
Cast and production staff:
Female Chorus – Olivia Rose Tringham; Male Chorus – Daniel Gray Bell; Lucretia: Emma Roberts; Tarquinius: Stephen Whitford; Collatinus: Oleksii Zasiadko; Junius: Maximilian Catalano; Bianca: Mia Serracino; Lucia: Nikki Martin.
Stage Directors – Eleanor Burke & Alex Gotch; Music Director – Oliver Cope; Set/Costume Designer – Jenniger Gregory; Lighting Designer – Cherry Keng; Assistant Stage Director – Katie Blackwell; Stage Manager – Alexandra Brown; Assistant Stage Manager – Charlie Tiernan; Production Manager – Ida Pontopiddan; Assistant Conductor – Kentaro Machida; Répétiteur – Lucy Colquhoun
Jacksons Lane Theatre, Highgate, London, 18 April 2026
All photos © Laurent Compagnon
Further performances until 26 April