“No man inveigh against the withered flower,
But chide rough winter that the flower hath killed.”
The Rape of Lucrece, William Shakespeare
The Hampstead Garden Opera (HGO) production of The Rape of Lucretia seems to understand, instinctively, that this opera is never merely about an ancient violation, but about the long afterlife of violence: how it enters a room, how it alters the air, how it rearranges the body’s relation to itself. What emerges at Jackson’s Lane Theatre is a DIY staging in the best sense of the phrase; it’s resourceful, tactile, yet one that never feels approximate. The opera is set within a tiny world of rails, chairs, a sink, television-like relics, and a space that behaves less like a Roman chamber than a strange urban jungle, a stage on which bodies must climb, hide, crouch, and force their way through the very architecture of the story. Microphones, speakers, those flickering TV artefacts, and the orchestra are never hidden away (indeed, the orchestra takes up a good third of the stage), giving the production a porousness. The machinery of performance itself is part of the drama.
The architecture matters. The railings along the right side of the stage seem at once practical and punitive, as though the characters were moving through a half-built fortress or a prison of the soul. The chairs that stand in for Lucretia’s bedchamber feel precarious, provisional, insultingly thin as a barrier against what is coming. The sink in the stage background becomes one of the production’s strangest and most effective objects: a site of attempted cleansing, of the body trying and failing to separate itself from what it has done or what has been done to it. Tarquinius splashes water over himself there in a gesture that only underscores the futility of his resistance to his own desire; Lucretia, later, seems to use the same place to reckon with her own shattered interiority, as though even the sound of water might be made to resemble blood.
That physicality finds its most unsettling expression in Tarquinius (played excellently by Stephen Whitford with a feral, almost Shakespearean intensity). He is rendered as not just predatory, but degraded by his own predation, ferocious and pathetic in equal measure. Let us remember Shakespeare: “This forced league doth force a further strife.” His desire is rabies. As he sings, “My blood is hot within me,” it lands as a diagnosis of some compulsion. His attempts to resist — clinging to walls, dousing himself at the sink — only make the inevitability clearer. It is one of the production’s keenest instincts that this figure should not simply embody villainy, but the ruinous comedy of appetite ungoverned.
It has to be said: the audience feels the absence of captions acutely. Though a performance sung entirely in English, the lack of surtitles is difficult to ignore, especially for a programme that claims to care deeply about accessibility. That sense of speech under strain is heightened by the production’s multimedia instincts. And when Tarquinius edges towards Lucretia, the Male Chorus suddenly speaks directly and cinematically into the microphone, “The time is night.” This suddenly reveals how much of the preceding text has been half-heard, half-lost.
The vocal writing is served with particular care, especially in the female ensemble work that precedes the terrible deed. “How calm, how pure is this night.” The opera is flanked by two narrators – one male, one female – lend the evening a strange doubling effect, at one point insisting, “This is the story of Lucretia,” as though trying to hold the narrative steady even as it fractures around them.
Emma Roberts as Lucretia is a phenom, her serenity and pain equally believable. The scene with the flowers when Lucretia is made to explain what has happened is exquisite in its cruelty. Her maids, blithe and domestic, speak of orchids and arrangements and the beauty of what has grown – “These blossoms will please your lord” – while Lucretia is forced into a terrible recognition of what orchids resemble, what they signify, what they cannot stop signifying now. Her rejection of them is total; she flings the flowers out of the TV-like vessel and shakes the dirt and pebbles loose. This feels like the destruction of a preserved microhabitat, a tiny world of carefully maintained purity brought violently to dust, shattering of the very form by which Lucretia has understood herself as a woman.
This production is so openly a mixed-media experience that one occasionally wonders whether the work might, in another universe, have been just as potent as a spoken word or modern musical theatre piece. Yet this is less a flaw than a provocation. When the Female Chorus offers the fragile line, “He will gather us together,” it doesn’t resolve anything. It lingers, uncertain, almost inadequate.
Jackson’s Lane Theatre delivers a living wound of a production, which is and will continue to be beautiful and interesting because it’s strange and difficult. It’s a worthy interpretation of this painful and perennially relevant story of sexual violence.
★ ★ ★ ★
Opera by Benjamin Britten
Libretto by Ronald Duncan
Stage Directors: Eleanor Burke and Alex Gotch
Music Director: Oliver Cope
Set/Costume Designer: Jennifer Gregory
Lighting Designer: Cheng Keng
Cast: Olivia Rose Tringham, Daniel Gray Bell, Emma Roberts, Stephen Whitford, Oleksii Zasiadko
Running time: 2 hrs 45 mins including 25 minute interval
Until: 26th April 2026