THE SERVANT PROBLEM:
OLIVER MEARS STRIPS HANDEL’S
SEMELE TO ITS DISEASED CORE

There’s something deeply unsettling about watching gods behave badly in a conference hotel. Oliver Mears‘ production of Handel’s Semele at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, which conquered Paris earlier this year, doesn’t just update the myth; it performs surgery on it, exposing putrid tissue beneath marble skin. This isn’t renovation; it’s forensic examination.

Mears’s vision of the piece is daringly bleak. It ends well for no one: Semele dead, her ex-fiancé Athamas and sister Ino trapped in a loveless marriage, Jupiter and Juno doomed to repeat the cycle of infidelity, jealousy and revenge. This is ancient myth refracted through the lens of contemporary anxieties about wealth, power, and exploitation.

The visual grammar assaults immediately. Designer Annemarie Woods sets the Olympians’ palace as the kind of conference hotel that critics spend their lives trying to avoid: blocky, anonymous and dingily lit. The regal Cadmus is demoted to a bell captain in a cheap suit; the greatest pleasures that Jupiter can summon up for Semele’s delectation seem to be the three Cs of cigarettes, champagne and chocolates. This aesthetic serves Mears’s larger purpose of exposing the essential emptiness of hedonistic power.

At the center of this dark vision stands Pretty Yende in a performance that transforms her into an unexpected Handelian. Her approach to the composer’s elaborate vocal writing feels intuitive rather than studied, each ornament placed with musical intelligence. The voice maintains its lustrous quality even in the most demanding passages, avoiding the brittleness that often mars such technically challenging music.

Mears reimagines Semele as a vulnerable employee caught within a web of institutional power. Yende embodies this conception with remarkable subtlety, her performance tracking the character’s emotional evolution through both vocal expression and physical presence. The result creates genuine empathy for a figure traditionally viewed with moral judgment. This represents a significant departure from traditional readings, transforming Semele from a cautionary tale about vanity into a victim of systemic abuse. Her delivery of “No, no, I’ll take no less” marks the character’s transformation from submissive naivety to determined self-assertion, emphasizing her dramatic arc.

Ben Bliss, making his Royal Opera debut as Jupiter, proves compelling through vocal warmth and expressive nuance. His rendition of “Where’er you walk” achieves extraordinary beauty, which only amplifies the character’s underlying menace.

Alice Coote brings both vocal richness and dramatic intelligence to Juno, embracing the character’s vindictive nature while maintaining musical sophistication. Her handling of the comedy feels precisely calibrated. In “Awake, Saturnia, from Thy Lethargy,” particularly the line “let her fall, rolling down the depths of night,” she deploys her lower register with devastating effect.

Brindley Sherratt takes on both Cadmus and Somnus, creating a particularly memorable image in the latter role. His Somnus emerges from a bathtub amid accumulated detritus, embodying decay and dissolution. The staging presents him as a figure of former authority now reduced to squalor.

Christian Curnyn conducts with the expertise of a Baroque specialist, though the Royal Opera Orchestra’s modern instruments create a fuller sound than period practice would suggest. The resulting texture serves Mears’s dramatic conception, even if it sacrifices some of Handel’s original transparency. This becomes grand opera reimagined as oratorio, the orchestral weight supporting the production’s psychological intensity.

Mears transforms Handel’s wit into something far darker, creating a production that courts controversy through its graphic elements. The staging includes disturbing medical imagery, displays of cremated remains from Jupiter’s previous victims, and Semele’s eventual replacement by another servant. These shocking moments serve the director’s argument about power’s systematic nature, preventing the work from devolving into mere satire.

Each shock serves his thesis: that power corrupts through entirely recognizable mechanisms of exploitation and disposal. The production’s bitter conclusion may diverge from Handel’s original intentions, yet its theatrical intelligence makes the opera compelling beyond its musical beauties. Rather than presenting Semele’s vanity as the central flaw, Mears focuses on Juno’s calculated cruelty, generating sympathy for Semele rather than moral censure.

This production marks only the second staging of Semele at Covent Garden since its 1744 premiere, making it part of the Royal Opera’s ongoing exploration of Handel’s works originally written for this venue. The contemporary resonances feel both urgent and inevitable. There is an undeniably contemporary resonance to Jupiter’s cruelty, even if this is not the first opera to be recast in the contemporary light of toxic masculinity. Ultimately, Semele is doomed to pay the price for daring to express her desires, and Mears ensures we see the cost with disturbing clarity.

Handel’s sublime music survives Mears’s interpretive violence, partly because the composer embedded enough moral ambiguity in his score to withstand radical recontextualization. Whether this constitutes faithful adaptation or willful vandalism depends on your definition of artistic fidelity. In an era when opera houses often play it safe, Mears has delivered something genuinely provocative: a production that uses Handel’s sublime music to examine the very real monsters that luxury and power can create.

In transforming gods into oligarchs, he’s perhaps revealed something uncomfortable about both ancient myth and contemporary power structures. This is opera as social commentary, mythological material transformed into contemporary critique. Whether it succeeds as entertainment is debatable; as artistic statement, it’s undeniably powerful. The servant problem, it turns out, was never really about staffing arrangements.

photos by Camilla Greenwell