Taylor, David F. (2014) Review of Handel's Hercules, directed by Peter Sellars, Canadian Opera Company. [Online]. (https://www.bsecs.org.uk/criticks-reviews/handels-...). Criticks: British Society for eighteenth century studies.

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Abstract

Revived by the Canadian Opera Company after its first run at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2011, Peter Sellars’s production of Handel’s Hercules spoons out post-9/11 political resonance with a rather large ladle, but then Sellars is hardly one for subtlety. Hercules is certainly not an opera and, riffing on Sophocles and Ovid, it’s not a true oratorio either. In fact, Handel and his librettist, Thomas Broughton, labelled it a “musical drama” when it was first performed (and flopped) at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket in 1745. Sellars’s solution to this generic conundrum is to stage Hercules almost as a Greek tragedy, placing considerable emphasis on the chorus, and to reimagine the eponymous hero as the veteran general of the US’s military campaign in Iraq/Afghanistan, whose triumphant return home is fractured by his own sense of guilt and dislocation.

Item Type:	Digital Scholarly Resource
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies
Journal or Publication Title:	Criticks Reviews
Publisher:	British Society for eighteenth century studies
Place of Publication:	Criticks
Official Date:	30 April 2014
Dates:	Date Event 30 April 2014 Published
Status:	Not Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Media of Output (format):	Online review
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access (Creative Commons)

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