The radical Californian director and veteran hippy Peter Sellars has an insatiable appetite, it seems, for narratives of colonial and sexual oppression. You might have thought that Purcell’s The Indian Queen, a masterpiece of the Restoration lyric theatre, was an unpromising candidate for such treatment. But that is to reckon without Sellars’s astonishing capacity for reinvention.
Purcell’s last major work sets a play by John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard about the struggle between Aztecs and Incas shortly before the arrival of the Conquistadors. Purcell scholar Curtis Price calls the plot “historically and geographically preposterous”, and the semi-opera is also unfinished — all of which pretty well gives Sellars carte blanche.
He turns it into a confrontation, a generation later, between Europeans and Mayans, told from a female perspective by interweaving a text by Nicaraguan writer Rosario Aguilar (Maritxell Carrero).
Incorporating fine music from other Purcell works, and sets combining ancient hieroglyphics and contemporary motifs by graffiti artist Gronk (and expressive choreography by Christopher Williams), Sellars presents an epic embracing world myth, ritual and ever-resonant social commentary.
There is singing of extraordinary eloquence by Lucy Crowe, Julia Bullock, Noah Stewart and Vince Yi, while Laurence Cummings draws lovely playing from the orchestra.
He indulges in daringly slow tempi and pregnant pauses to produce a backdrop for singing that melts the heart. The narrative’s coherence is not an obvious virtue and Sellars doesn’t always avoid cliché. But his achievement is to harness the power of music and theatre to transcend mundane experience.
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