Handel Goes to the Movies

Aci, Galatea, e Polifemo, staged by Jack Furness and fabulously sung in Docklands

Callum Thorpe (Polifemo/Director) pours sand over Mary Bevan (Aci) Picture © Craig Fuller

Handel’s early Italian cantatas were not written for stage performance. Nevertheless, for a young German composer with four operas under his belt - Nero, Daphne and Florindo are lost and only Almira survives from his early twenties - the cantatas were clearly an essential part of his development into a fully fledged theatre composer in the operatic centres of Florence and Venice. Rome, under the watchful eye of the Pope, had banned opera, but un-staged, quasi-operatic scenes in secular and sacred cantatas were all the rage, getting around the religious edicts, and satisfying audiences’ taste for virtuoso singers acting out figures from history or mythology in concert form.

Last year’s London Handel Festival (LHF) created a compelling evening of music theatre out of four of these short, early works, directed by Adele Thomas under the collective title ‘In the Realms of Sorrow’ and performed in one of the West End’s most unusual performing spaces, The Stone Nest in Shaftesbury Avenue. This former chapel and sometime nightclub, an ideal environment for such an inventively theatrical endeavour, is now up for sale, and so for this year’s LHF event, titled ‘Aci by the River’, an alternative venue had to be found. The Chain Store, next to the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf, is quite a trek from Central London, but as ‘found spaces’ go, it proved an atmospheric and congenial auditorium.

‘Aci by the River’ comprised not just a staging of Handel’s ‘serenata’ Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, an evening-filling work, approximately 90 minutes in duration with no interval. It also had a surprise element, which I unfortunately missed: a section of the audience was transported to Trinity Buoy Wharf by boat with Handel’s Water Music as accompaniment. Whatever one thinks of artistic director Gregory Batsleer’s attempts to rejuvenate LHF’s audience, this is just the kind of event a festival should mount.