Poppea Crowned: A Crowning Achievement of Student Theatre
Livia Bell & Charlotte Crawley Triumph in the most ambitious show I've ever seen at Cambridge
(Due to a Varsity Magazine slip-up I was prepared to write this review for them, I’ve expanded it a little and made it more personal for use on my substack)
Also: major update! …And in the Scherzo… has a brand new RADIO SHOW courtesy of CamFM (97.2 CamFM, link to our web player here: https://www.camfm.co.uk. I’m on every Friday at noon GMT playing the hottest, most vibrant, most exciting 20th & 21st century classical music. Last week we had Martinu, Ustvolskaya, Takemitsu, Smaldone, Grace Williams, Dorothy Howell, Leo Weiner, Silvestre Revueltas, Rita Strohl, and more! If you like this kind of thing, tune in next week!)
Review: “L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)” performed at West Road, Cambridge, 2025. Directed by Livia Bell, produced by Charlotte Crawley. 4.5/5 stars.
I haven’t really had the chance to discuss opera on this substack yet, but I should. It’s probably my favorite genre—I love a symphony, I love chamber music, I love the organ, but opera has such a special place in my heart. I think this can be attributed to two factors: 1) stylization, and 2) narrative. The second point is the easiest to explain: I love a story. I adore narrative. I care about storytelling. Don’t most people?
The first point is more subtle. The combination of words with music, neither of which would be sufficient on their own, creates a powerful, immediate, emotional experience. I think a lot of people miss this—I did too, when I first started listening to opera. It took me a LOT of listens and watches before I ‘got’ it. But I’ll put it this way. You could compose a speech that very specifically and with great finesse describes the thought, “Do I love her?” but our inner lives are not actually governed by words, are they? You could compose a melody that tries to do the same, but it will always be subject to debate and reinterpretation because so many emotional experiences are close to each other, and subjective anyways. But pair the words “Do I love her?” with a melody that works in tandem, and all you actually want is a vague suggestion of the emotional experience in words (this is why librettos are usually not great literature to read on their own) because the melody, instrumentation, and vocal expression shapes the words to be particular to an emotional journey. It’s an incredible thing, opera.
I’ll also come out on record as saying that I love Monteverdi. I think he was one of the most gifted vocal-writers in the history of western music. Claudio Monteverdi is sometimes considered the ‘first’ baroque composer, and thus the beginning of the entire chain of classical music (this, of course, is not strictly true, there are medieval and renaissance composers that are worth listening to, and arguably Hildegard von Bingen holds the title as the actual first ever classical composer). But Monteverdi is early, that’s for sure. But listen to his “Lamento della Ninfa” and tell me that he can’t reach across four centuries and touch your heart. There’s nothing artificial or difficult to understand about Monteverdi’s description of loss and abandonment. It’s as evocative and clear as anything any of the 19th century romantics managed. Or the opening of his “Vespro 1610” (Deus, in audjutorium…) which just bristles with excitement and energy. Or his motet Beatus vir, it’s got a tune that’ll get stuck in your head for weeks. Some 17th century composers require work to bridge the gap between our & their musical conventions, but if Claudio Monteverdi were alive today he’d be churning out top-20 hits. I really do believe that.
Monteverdi is also tangled up in the early history of opera’s invention. I mean, the word ‘opera’ postdates his death. He wrote, not the first opera, but the first opera that we still perform and listen to and care about, 1607’s L’Orfeo, and, let me tell you, if you’ve never heard/seen it, close this email right now, hop over to YouTube or Spotify or whatever, and give it a go. L’Orfeo is an all-out banger from start to finish, and it’s also quite concise. Just flagging that now, for no particular reason.
[The early history of opera is actually kind of fascinating. Italian intellectuals towards the end of the 16th century wanted to re-create the experience of Ancient Greek tragedy, which they understood involved different types of line-deliveries: sung, chanted, and spoken, with a small handful of instruments and a formulaic mythic theme. Hence why the early operas were nearly all mythical in their subject matter, something which persisted into the 18th century as well. Well, that and the fact that myth & music just work together so well.]
So Monteverdi hits it big with his books of madrigals, his 1607 L’Orfeo, and his 1610 Vespers. But in terms of opera, there’s a 30+ years gap where we have little evidence of what he was actually working on. When we get Monteverdi operas again, it’s from near the end of his life: 1641’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria. And two years later, the last of his relatively long life, L’incoronazione di Poppea.
I don’t think it’s unimportant that this is dated to the year that he died. The most moving parts of this opera all concern death, leave-taking, endings, and a sort of ultimate concern for the state of the world. The best part of L’incoronazione di Poppea, if you want to sell yourself on the brilliance of this opera, is Seneca’s death sequence, where the aged philosopher declares himself ready to leave the world, and his students try to convince him not to. It’s hard not to hear echoes of the 76-year-old Claudio Monteverdi himself in this calm, acceptance of the end. Sort of a Strauss’ Vier Letzte Lieder from 300 years earlier. Man, it’s just so good!
A complete L’incoronazione runs about 3 hours and change, but I am not expert enough to identify if any cuts were made to the ‘original’ text (as I understand it, there are two competing manuscripts with significant differences anyways) so from here on out I will be giving the summary with reference to the live performance at Cambridge.
We open with a brief overture that segues into a typically baroque prologue: character-personifications of Love, Fortune, and Virtue are arguing over who has more control over human affairs. Love wins, of course. This is, in some ways programmatic of the rest of the opera— this is about to tell the story of the triumph of erotic love over, yes, morality, virtue, and everything else—but it arguably undersells what’s coming. I think the staging helped quite a bit here: the press-conference squabbling added a dose of humor, and Anna Williams’ Love just brimmed with authority, conviction, and arrogance (as it must!). Her sequence was genuinely fantastic and it helped make the prologue make sense. Here and elsewhere I really have to commend the acting chops of all the singers. I’ve seen too many operas where the cast views themselves primarily as singers who get dressed up and go and stand somewhere and sing to the audience. But here— and I don’t know if the credit goes to Livia Bell or somebody else on the production team— you really got the sense that everyone spent time figuring out how to inhabit their characters and really deliver the action to the audience. Even though most of these characters are unlikable to some degree or other — more on that later.
In the next scene Otho (Josh Dennis), here a sort of awkward and comic ‘niceguy’/incel shows up at his lover Poppea’s office to give her flowers and a teddy bear, but spotting Nero’s bodyguards, realizes that they’re having an affair. Again, comedy is used to make Otho’s unlikeability more palatable and entertaining without sacrificing his fundamental characterization. Josh Dennis really does a commendable job walking that tightrope, and I don’t think there was ever a moment he was onstage that he didn’t seem fully in-character and committed.
Nero’s bodyguards wake up and have a brief comic interlude, Nero and Poppea come in and sing the first of many rapturous love-duets to each other, and Nero leaves. The comedy works, and the love-duet mostly works, so I will have to pause here and talk about the two stars of the opera: Nero and Poppea. Poppea Sabina (30-65 AD) is one of those historical women who are so unquestionably hard-done by her contemporary and near-contemporary sources, I’m not sure what we can safely say about her at all. Tacitus absolutely hates her and Suetonius makes her into a scheming, conniving murderer. Historically speaking she was married to Otho, who she left for Nero, and she became Empress of Rome for a few years, before dying under somewhat mysterious circumstances (again, it depends how much you trust the sources—you probably should not). In this particular opera, I think she comes across as a bit more ambiguous than in the Roman texts. Her love for Nero feels, dare I say, kind of sincere, and while it’s true that she wants power and looks forward to ruling—who wouldn’t? It also helps that Otho is so profoundly unwantable. She comes across a good deal more sympathetic here. But still the character is a hard one to play, and in that Edie Behr succeeds with aplomb. She inhabits the character’s sexuality without making it feel cheap or artificial, she makes the desire for power seem almost innocent or neutral, and she sells her affair with Nero as the excusable product of true love. Her Poppea is, at the end of the day, an enjoyable, positive force, and her singing is gorgeous throughout. Really, I find what she did with that role something of a miracle.
Nero is, at least in this production, a bit more straightforward. He’s totally devoted to Poppea, a bit capricious and violent, although that’s not the main theme of his characterization. Here again the acting triumphs: Myriam Lowe portrays him as a swaggering bad boy, with black leather jacket and spiky hair. Her every movement oozes control, authority, and a kind of smirking allure. I did find—and this is a totally unfair critique, but one I have to make—her voice to be the one place in the cast that didn’t match the character. She has such a clean, crystalline, slightly church-y vocal texture, it sounded really odd coming from that particular character. A wonderful singer who has skill and talent to spare but I genuinely felt that it affected the immersiveness very slightly that Nero sounded so clean-cut and sweet. Still!
Back to our walkthrough of this opera, Poppea is warned by Arnalta not to trust Nero in a sparkling comic duet — huge, huge props to Felix Blake’s Arnalta, which was, again, just so tremendously fun and engaging. And finally we get to one of my favorite characters. Octavia, Nero’s wife, enters and sings sadly about the lot of women (nods from the audience). Isabella’s Theodosius’s Octavia was beyond perfect— you felt so, so bad for her, and yet she didn’t play the character in a one-note kind of way. You could feel her power, her moral core and integrity, her righteous anger. And good lord her voice was just phenomenal. There is only one other singer I will say this about but I wanted every scene with Isabella to last longer so I could hear her sing more.
Her own PA, Nutrice, has another comic-esque scene where she tries to convince Octavia to have a revenge-affair. I admit this was good too and Daniel Blaze is also a very funny and talented singer but it was at this point that you start to wonder if all of these sequences are adding anything to the overall plot. One comic duet—sure. But this one felt thoroughly unnecessarily. Octavia isn’t going to have an affair. We all know it. It was too clear from the start.
And then my other favorite singer: Miki Derdun as Seneca. I will be making sure to attend anything he’s in from now on because what a voice, what an utterly fantastic voice. Seneca could come across as a little too pious and sententious (almost all of his lines are trite little epigrams about morality) but Miki carries it: he portrays Seneca with gravitas but also style, introspection, and a kind gentleness. Notice also that the continuo instruments switch (gosh, I haven’t even talked about the orchestra) to an organ rather than a harpsichord to give him a little bit of extra weight. Seneca offers Octavia some kind words—one of the only places in this opera that feels pleasant—and then is mocked by Valletto, his ‘intern’ portrayed with great panache and flair by Rosamund Da Sousa Correa, but, again, I have to ask why every single scene needs these followups. They drag. This is not Rosamund’s fault, who did everything perfectly right. But still…
Next Nero tells Seneca his plan to divorce Octavia (acted brilliantly: so much self-assuredness) and Seneca objects with a kind of sad, agedness. He’s sent off. Poppea lies to Nero about Seneca, so Nero gives a death sentence. Things are hotting up. Meanwhile Otho wonders if he should kill Poppea for abandoning him, although he quickly comes out of this. His ex, Drusilla, shows up and Otho rebounds right into her arms—the music and the staging want us to ask questions about how sincere this love is, and I think the answer is ‘not tremendously’. Otho even has a moment right after where he admits he isn’t quite over Poppea. Drusilla is played very nicely by Lydia Baldwin. She does fantastically well in her final scene (post arrest) it must be said.
Seneca decides the time has come for him to pass away when the Roman god Mercury appears dressed as a Mormon (?) and offers him a Bible. Benedict Randall Shaw is an incredibly gifted comic actor and his Mercury brings a real touch of levity to this scene. After that, Seneca bids farewell to his students and walks offstage to end his life. This is the indisputable best scene in the opera, it’s got intensity and tons of lovely, lovely vocal lines. I do not think the staging benefitted from adding comedy here, the music is just a bit too lovely and sincere. Still, it’s pulled off beautifully from the vocal perspective. That is the end of Act 1.
Whew.
I’ll speed through the second half, since there aren’t too many new characters to introduce. There’s a comic song in praise of sex between Valletto and another character (didn’t quite catch their name) that truly, truly, could have been cut, and a scene where Nero and Lucan get drunk and Nero just wants to talk about Poppea and how beautiful she is. This is a fascinating scene for Latinists because its portrayal of Lucan as a carousing lapdog of Nero doesn’t quite gel with his very serious and very grim extant book (pharsalia) and its serious anti-imperial themes. The vocal writing is very fun, I like how the drunk-acting went (often problematic in operas) and I particularly loved the implication that Nero and Lucan were flirting with each other. Much more could have been done with that if that was the intention. Garbhan McEnoy’s Lucan is pretty great, but it’s a small character that I wish more had been done with, OR that he had been cut. Next Otho enters and, wouldn’t you know it, is still in love with Poppea. Octavia enters and, somewhat unmotivatedly, orders him to assassinate Poppea. He decides to disguise as a woman so he can sneak into her house, and he gets the clothes off of Drusilla, who is, poor thing, only too happy to help the man she loves. Meanwhile, Poppea is taking a nap in her garden with another witty song from Arnalta. Love (remember her from the prologue?) comes to keep guard over her, and she foils Otho’s not-brilliantly-thought-out assassination plan (you really wonder if his heart was in it at all). He flees, but because of the whole clothes thing, they think he’s Drusilla. Drusilla gets arrested — this is her best scene by the way. She refuses to rat out who really did it and accepts the punishment, but Otho enters at the last second and proves that it was really him. An unexpected bit of nobility from our guy. Nero is a bit impressed by all this ‘trying to take the hit for each other’ and exiles them both, but, in THIS version (and not in Monteverdi’s) changes his mind and shoots Otho. I guess it’s a bit of Checkhov’s gun, you can’t have characters waving pistols around without firing them. The way they staged the shot was brilliant too, with lighting and sound effects that felt, not real, but stylized in exactly the right ways. I’m on the fence about whether this change works or not—I mean, it makes Nero a bit more like the Nero of pop culture, but were we after that? I don’t know. Yeah, I think on the balance it was pretty cool.
Finally, Octavia is exiled, Nero proposes to a delighted Poppea, and Octavia says goodbye to her country. Nero and Poppea enter in wedding clothes and the chorus sings a joyful wedding song. Nero and Poppea declare their love for each other again, and the curtain falls.
This has been a long synopsis but I wanted to mention highlights, lowlights, and standout individual performances along the way. I have a few more brief scattered thoughts and I can bring this mammoth review to a close.
First, count the number of time Monteverdi has a singer talk about breasts. They all do: Otho, Nero, Valletto… everyone in this play is obsessed with breasts. It’s very funny as a through line and got some good audience laughs. I suppose the larger point here is how the show balanced comedy and genuine darkness. I mean, people die. A guy kills himself. A man tries to shoot his ex. And yet the surtitles usually went for irreverent humor, the type of thing you’d expect to see in, I don’t know, the Marriage of Figaro. I think it was a mostly successful balance, but to what end?
Second, the stage was really excellently designed. Big props to Livia Bell and Charlotte Crawley. (Picture below). It was spacious, made good use of levels, worked for more or less every scene. The portrait of Nero watching over everything felt apt and beautifully done, and I just couldn’t be a bigger fan of the set design. Costumes too were utterly perfect for every single character, major and minor. They never detracted, only enhanced the overall vision. For that matter, was this show inspired by Megalopolis? I was on the fence. Sometimes it felt like it was interested in Francis Ford Coppola’s fusion of Ancient Roman politics with modernity & the future, his blending of corporate elites and dynasties, love and sex and intrigue. The paparazzi. The flashing cameras. It did all feel kind of Megalopolis. Which, I get it…this is a bit of a Megalopolis kind of opera.
I guess I’ll finish on the orchestra. Well. “orchestra”. We had a band of 9 I believe (I might have miscounted), consisting of a harpsichord, theorbo, organ, viol, cello, and then 2 baroque recorders and 2 violins. Of these, 5 were on continuo work, and then recorders & violins floated in and out as needed. This is a tiny, tiny force, and while they all played brilliantly (I want to give particular credit to Raphael Herberg’s unfailingly perfect cello lines that always complimented the singing, and the first violin: was this Aisling Martin, Camdram might be letting me down here… anyways the first violinist was utterly brilliant). Also I do love a theorbo, what a gorgeous sounding instrument. But yes, the result was that the instrumental lines were always thin and there are just not very many tricks Monteverdi yet has access to. Compare him to, you know, Wagner or even Mozart— a thicker, fuller orchestra allows for more color, variation, and play. It isn’t Monteverdi’s fault that he didn’t have that yet, of course, but the relative minimalism of the band really just didn’t help with this opera’s one, and only, flaw.
It was so long.
A lot of my favorite operas are long, in total fairness, and I don’t think I would mind listening to a full score of L’incoronazione, but watching it live requires more attention, more alertness. I love Shakespeare too but you’d never do Shakespeare without quite a lot of hefty cuts. Right? A full Hamlet would run almost four hours: you’ve never seen a full Hamlet, I almost guarantee it. It feels on the one hand so ungrateful to dock half a star for length, when there were no individual moments I would describe as ‘not good’ — every singer, every scene was carefully thought out and brilliantly performed—but I cannot deny that the resulting opera felt a little exhausting and, from my seat in the audience, I think everybody else was ready for the curtain quite a bit earlier. I don’t want to be hyperbolic and I don’t want to be rude but it was, kind of, sincerely, an uncomfortably long experience. Too much of a good thing, you know?
L’incoronazione di Poppea is the most ambitious student show I’ve ever seen. Everybody involved deserved unending kudos, and if you didn’t get a chance to see it you truly did miss out. I can’t wait to see what every single person involved in this goes on to do next. I am so glad I saw and heard this stunning, stunning piece of musical theatre.
