FringeReview UK 2026

Rinaldo

Arcola Theatre and Ralph Bridle

Genre: classical, European Theatre, Fringe Theatre, International, Live Music, Music, Opera and Operatic Theatre, Theatre, Translation

Venue: Grimeborn, Arcola Theatre, Dalston, Studio 1

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Director Ralph Bridle’s drastic cutting down of a Handel opera, repurposing the ending? Sounds just like Handel himself. With Rinaldo Handel stormed London in 1711 with his first opera composed for the capital. Bridle’s company features music director David Eaton leading from the piano; and a cast of four sword-crossed lovers at the Arcola’s Grimeborn Festival of opera at Dalston till August 22.

In reinventing, Bridle’s being very Handelian. Not least as in Rinaldo, Handel repurposed an Armide opera. That is sorceress Armide, almost a genre in herself, made famous from Lully to Gluck. Handel gives the title to the pale hero instead. Bridle kind of turns it back. It’s her tragedy.

The original opera runs over three hours with an interval, Here it takes just under two. The overture and several characters are dispensed with. The crusading king Goffredo – who might have furnished a far stronger critique of racist imperialism had he stayed – is now a posthumous photo Rinaldo swears to (it’s reversible: Armide is on the other side; an ergonomic prop on a chair). The dispensable king’s brother Eustazio is gone too, along with the lesser role of Christian sorcerer and minor roles. We’re left with the eroticised quartet whose cat’s cradle of confusions make up so much of Act Two.

It means we start with Will Prior’s lyric counter-tenor Rinaldo swearing pre-battle love to Llio Evans’ plangent and dramatically intense Almirena. In an exchange of arias, then a duet, they sing of the eternal etc as she thrusts his sword into a red sheath. Handel would have enjoyed such obvious symbolism.

We’re soon introduced to Susanna Davis’s terrific, flaring Armida, who helps her lover the Saracen king, Argente in his battle against the invading Crusaders. Danny Shelby enjoys an ardent and finely moulded baritone. In trumpeting vocality – lower tessitura, cut-through expression and diction – Handel has seemingly sided with them. But that’s of course to forget the trumpet-voiced Goffredo et al are gone. What we have left with Rinaldo and Alminera are vertiginous and lyrical declarations. With Prior and Evans though, this is easily enough: especially as Evans can break hearts.

Giacomo Rossi’s libretto, taking from Tasso’s 1581 Gerusalemme liberata does what 17th-18th century libretti do with a slightly bonkers late Renaissance counter-Reformation masterpiece. What is it with the misogynistic 16^th century? It’s there in Spenser’s Fairie Queene too. Virtue is afflicted, maidens assailed, sirens with more sexual experience switch desires to conquered knights. Who resist them. And their partners hit on the assailed virgin. Virtue is eventually rewarded; though the knight can have been engaged in a garden of delight, a helpful fig-leaf of a metaphor. But he’s a bloke, so by the early 18th century it’s allowed so long as he repents. (That’s not opted for here.) And if it’s the crusaders, ancient history or more recent Sultanate, there’s a chance the infidels convert to Christianity too. That is spontaneously, at the point of a sword.

Costume designer Bessy Mo has gone for a gordian-knot simplicity of black/white irony. Armide and Argente are clad in black struck with purple; Armide sporting a right arm with serious ruffles and a shocking moment at the end. Their opposites are white-clothed: Rinaldo in fact in creditable Crusader gear, Alminera in a simple flowing robe.

The dark-garbed duo are more striking in a military way than their Christian oppos. And this is an opera about battles, something the written introduction emphasises. To be honest with most martial music excised, the context and some key conflict is gone too.

Moments when Armide has morphed herself into the appearance of Alminera to fool Rinaldo into a snog are as deftly handled as they can be, the two sopranos mirroring each other, Evans a kind of human shield. It certainly works for those of us who know the opera.

Prior and Evans enjoy a touching garden tryst just after Alminera sings of a caged bird, here a small hand puppet: a delicious irony proleptic not just of what happens to Alminera but of the heedless imprisonment the soi-disant virtuous inflict in their turn. It’s at this moment Davis comes on to freeze Prior’s knight with a gesture and lead off Evans with a ball of red string. After a desolate introduction, Prior enjoys his finest aria of abandonment at the end of Act One, and indeed the interval. “Venti, turbini” summons the winds to rocket him to his abducted beloved, roaring with Prior: and Eaton’s  summoning an orchestra through his fingers. It shows off their mettle for a send-off. Acts Two and Three are telescoped into an hour.

Act Two mostly concerns Argente and Armide trying to cheat on each other: he tries it on with captured Alminera. Whereas Armide having ensnared the venturesome Ricardo to kill him, falls for him instead.

Evans’ greatest moment comes around twice. “Lascia ch’io pianga” or “Let me weep” – Nick Fowler’s subtitles project an excellent translation – after her attempted seduction by Argente’s restrained villainy in Shelby’s hands. Originally from 1707, the year of Dixit Dominus when Handel was just 22, it shows Handel already (and rightly) recycling his best tunes from Italy, 1706-10; otherwise left in dusty cardinals’ shelves and his bottom drawer. There’s quite a few such moments in Rinaldo. Handel wrote it at top speed.

Evans here is dramatically grainy-voiced in grief, full of affect and power. It’s an aria often sung seductively as if Armide or Delilah were cosplaying virtue. Yet Evans shows how plangent and devastated this is, using the limited coloratura (it’s pretty lyrical and slow) characterfully.

And she comes round with it again after much of the cut-down action of Act Three focuses on Davis and Shelby in powerful confrontations and mutual recriminations, sinewy duetting like swordplay. That’s after Prior and Evans reunite to more rapture: “Cara sposa” another hit, is translated as “beloved” and not confusingly “beloved husband/wife-to-be”.

The denouement is shocking. It’s the great theatrical coup of the evening and rather horrible. Stage blood is something I’ve not seen here before. And Evans’ Alminera wishes to be left alone after all this. The original ending full of conversions to Christianity is gone and we’re left with “Let me weep”. In such a shearing-down it’s extremely effective and makes its point. It might even – in itself – be preferable.

Allowing any more original characters to survive editing would unbalance this chamber version. Yet it’s a little regrettable. Had Goffredo and a bit more military apparatus survived, the overt critique of essentially racist imperialism would have been clearer. And a full production is ultimately preferable. The end as it is, is strong enough to make one wish there had been a bit more context than the love quartet to truly make it land.

The four soloists are superb, each voice proportionate and expressive to the singer’s character. Eaton is consummate at making his upright dramatic; particularly telling are the minor-keyed passacaglias of grief.

Very highly recommended for anyone who enjoys taking the pith of Handel, seriously: yet can appreciate what’s been excised: which can be lumber. Those who’ve not encountered operatic Handel night need a little pointing up; but this close-up encounter delivers his essence.

Costume Designer Bessy Mo, Cover Repetiteur Satoshi Kobu, Stage Manager Octavia Penes, Subtitles Nick Fowler.

Published August 23, 2026August 23, 2026 by Simon Jenner