Handel Furioso – review

Opera returns to Dalston. Photograph: Grimeborn

Handel Furioso feels more like a play with opera than an opera with acting – in a refreshing way.

Anna Starushkevych and Robyn Allegra Parton, playing a couple in and out of and back in love, deliver the most truthful acting performances I’ve seen in an intimate opera (and their many singing awards are warranted).

You like them, you feel for them, and you may at times tune out (opera takes its time and you know what’s going to happen), but the show’s 75 minutes pass quickly and enjoyably.

The new opera company Isle of Noise have woven some of Handel’s arias, oratorios, chamber duets and ballet music into a generalised love story, similar to ‘jukebox musicals’ like Mamma Mia and Jersey Boys (where Handel is the inspiring ‘band’).

They are one of a few London companies trying to make opera more down-to-earth and affordable, and appealing to a broader audience.

What sets them apart is that, instead of adapting an existing opera to English and to the present day, they have created an opera out of existing songs in Italian.

After this success in Handel Furioso, as part of the Arcola Theatre’s Grimeborn opera festival, I’d like to see more.

Although supertitles were projected cleverly onto a hanging moon toward the back of the stage, the couple’s singing was so sweet, and their acting so naturalistic, that I forgot they were using Italian.

I barely read the translations (which were sometimes awkward anyway). I understood what the pair were expressing.

Handel Furioso runs through 31 August at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, Dalston, E8 3DL, then tours to Oxford and Liverpool in October and November