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Brindley Sherratt in Semele at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (Photo: Vincent Pontet)

Semele is a cruel story, and also a comedy: but not a cruel comedy. Not just that, it’s a tragedy as well, and not one that makes light of poor Semele’s horrid end. Well, in fact it’s an elegant satire on human vanity from the Swiftian days of Queen Anne that knows how to juggle and mix the tone to create a drama that is sad, funny and socially piquant all at the same time. And Handel treated it in exactly that way, with musical nods to the old world it emerged from, and the comedy and tragedy and happiness and sadness massively amplified by the music (as usual).

You’d think that was enough to be going on with, but no, it’s not good enough for the earnest opera director de nos jours. Oliver Mears is director of opera at the Royal Ballet and Opera, where this show will transfer with the same cast in summer, and he should be old enough not to want everything to be a 'searing indictment' of something or other; but that is what he attempts, and in the process he destroys the balance of Congreve’s drama, undermines and undersells the power of Handel’s score, and fails to convince us of the story he has elected to beat us round the heads with. So that’s a pity.

Things start OK. We are in some sort of high-end hotel in the Seventies, with uniformed staff and a CEO (Jove, played by Ben Bliss) with a roving eye. Cinderella-ish Semele (Pretty Yende) is sweeping up the ashes from the big fireplace (yep, that’ll get used in Act Three) when that eye alights on her. A lot of plot-work is done in the overture: Ino’s yearning for Athamas, Juno’s jealousy, the elements of the story neatly and efficiently lined up while Emmanuelle Haïm’s orchestra runs through the music with a jovial bounce. The lulling strings cradle Semele with much sympathy while she pleads in that generous, rich-toned voice with Jove to whisk her away from her wedding to the severely mulletted Athamas (Carlo Vistoli), who sings with a lot of energy and spirit but whose hocketing delivery is very much not to my taste. His exchanges with Niamh O’Sullivan’s attractively dark-toned Ino are curtailed – and that sub-plot usually feels the least successful strand of Handel’s scheme anyway. Duly whisked away, Semele then returns to the hotel foyer to sing ‘Endless pleasure’, the cruel chorus switching its sympathy away from poor Athamas with indecent haste.

Act Two gives us a reasonably fun double-act between Alice Coote playing (and singing) it quite broadly as scorned and vengeful Juno, with Marianne Hovanisyan the delightful Iris, light and agile, itemising Semele’s victory with unsisterly glee. This is the act where Handel makes us love big-hearted, small-brained Semele, with airs like ‘O sleep…’, gorgeously accompanied on organ, cello and lute, but Mears, fixated on creating a sturdy, self-willed heroine, makes her more peevish than sympathetic – though her ‘With fond desiring’ is very spirited, if not particularly stable on the actual notes. Trying to pacify her, Bliss sings with a nice, strong, easy tone and the best Handelian style of the evening, but it’s not a very sexy performance, and the ’70s sitcom tache and sideys are rarely a great look unless you are Burt Reynolds. There is some tepid horseplay under a sheet which makes you long for Woody Allen to be flown in as comedy advisor. And Mears’s dramatic flair deserts him during the rollicking chorus – delivered with terrific style, as they all are – ‘Now Love, that laughing boy’, with Semele boringly and repetitively pampered by her ex-colleagues. Jove’s very beguilingly sung and played ‘Where’er you walk’ doesn’t deliver the promised paradisal transformation, though Semele evidently doesn’t notice. But with Ino’s arrival, Haïm puts everything into delivering Handel’s 'ecstasy of sound', and that mysterious and magical Purcellian passage between the two sisters is fabulously good, though unimaginatively staged.

Ben Bliss and Pretty Yende in Semele at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (Photo: Vincent Pontet)

Act Three tries to mix the comedy of Somnus (nicely done, Brindley Sherratt as some superannuated sommelier, wasted in his bath surrounded by thousands of empty bottles and cans) with a sort of gritty ITV-drama-level sex-traffic realism as Juno sacrifices a most unwilling Pasithea to his abominable lust: a juxtaposition that simply doesn’t work. And so to Semele’s downfall. She’s been feeling peaky for a while (remember baby Bacchus, busy gestating?) and Juno’s clumsily-handled magic mirror doesn’t really cheer her up. According to Mears’s programme note (but not the stage) she individuates here as strong woman wanting (quite reasonably) to have a relationship of equality with Jove and generally disrupt the system of social divisions. The only trouble is, that’s another show entirely.

I won’t 'spoil' the ending: Mears does that well enough on his own. Suffice to say that we’re in Wozzeck-plus levels of grimness, which sits poorly with Handel, not least the happy-bunny final chorus: yes, I know it’s equivocal, mortals pathetically happy with the comforting sop idly thrown them by the gods. But still: maybe that’s as good as it gets, and Handel sure as heck didn’t want us to feel sick at the end of Semele. The sudden access of sophomoric victim-porn does away with Congreve’s blithe parable about the delusion of all human hopes and ambition, and basically tries to cancel everything that has gone before: Juno’s full-on, cathartic harpydom, the fleeting but actual joys of love, the idea that contradictory things can and do happen at the same time, that people (and gods) are complicated. 

The orchestra and chorus of Haïm’s band Le concert d’Astrée is marvellous throughout, varied, forceful, forgiving, deep and beautiful. The singing, frankly, is not up to standard, Semele increasingly approximate, her tone inconsistent. Oliver Mears is, actually, a good director (including of comedy), but his attempt to pull a kind of Bieito-lite in the final reel is a catastrophe that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth – and not just the one he intends.