Platée by Jean-Philippe Rameau, Garsington Opera at Wormsley. 29 May – 30 June 2024.

3✩✩✩ Review: Clare Colvin.

“Baroque frog in tall tale by Rameau.”

Jean-Philippe Rameau’s rarely performed 1745 baroque comedy to celebrate the marriage of the Dauphin, Louis VI’s heir, is about a frog so hopelessly vain she convinces herself that the god Jupiter is in love with her. When it’s suggested the King of gods might be trying to avoid her instead, Platée claims he’s a shy lover. The unappealing wood nymph is fooled by a bunch of boozy courtiers, including Mercury, into believing that Jupiter is madly in love with her.

​Their scheme is that Jupiter’s jealous wife Juno would realise she had nothing to fear when she caught Platée in a clinch with the king of the gods, and it would cure her of her jealousy. The cruel joke was softened (Platée was devastated by seeing herself through others’ eyes) by turning the title character into a high tenor in drag like a pantomime dame. The first Platée I ever saw on stage, at Opera du Rhin, Strasbourg in 2014, was Paul Agnew in the high tenor title role with frog-like mask as Platée. In Garsington Opera’s 2024 production, Paul Agnew conducts the English Concert impeccably from the orchestra pit, with the lyrical tenor Simon Boden as Platée.

​Director Louisa Muller sees the opera as having something of a Reality TV studios about it, like Versailles. The stage is divided into two different areas, one being the set of a Reality TV studios and the other a Manga-like running film reflecting Platée’s fevered imaginings of Jupiter and Amore. There are some brilliant sequences that plunge us into gold , and moments when the different mediums add confusion to the mix. Nice use made, though of the original onomatopoeia in the frog-like croaking of “Quoi? Quoi? Quoi?”

​Ossian Huskinson is in tremendous bass-baritone voice as Jupiter with six-pack glitter jacket, flanked by Mafia-style minders in smart shades. We don’t hear much of Annabel Kennedy’s Juno till the end as she storms off early in jealous rage toting a gold weekend suitcase. Soprano Mireille Asselin is in delightful voice as La Folie, commenting on folly.

​One advantage this years, particularly for the performers, is that Garsington Studios is open after four years of construction, with state of the art studios and facilities, so that rehearsals can take place on site, instead of trekking to London’s East End, and provide other space for the future .

Cast

Platée - Samuel Boden

La Folie - Mireille Asselin

Thespis & Mercury - Robert Murray

Momus - Jonathan McGovern

Satyr & Chitheron - Henry Waddington

Jupiter - Ossian Huskinson

Thalie - Holly Brown

Clarine - Holly Teague

Amor - Victoria Songwei Li

Juno- Annabel Kennedy

Maenad 1 - Audrey Tsang

Maenad 2 - Nancy Holt

Creatives

Conductor Paul Agnew

Director Louisa Muller

Designer Christopher Oram

Lighting Designer Malcolm Rippeth

Video Design Illuminos

Movement Director Rebecca Howell