#stage-design

#stage-design

Handel's Semele is one of those works that refuses to sit neatly in a box. First staged at Covent Garden in 1744, it was billed as a new oratorio to slip past London's strict Lenten ban on opera. Yet what audiences encountered was no pious oratorio at all, but a glittering mythological drama brimming with erotic charge, satire, and Italianate arias.

"The best design does not have evident designs on its audience... Tomas Palmer's design scarcely seems arranged: it is simply a place in which things happen."