Jephtha: Allan Clayton compels in a dark and powerful new staging of Handel’s last oratorio

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time: in order to gain victory in battle, you vow to God to sacrifice the first living thing you see on your return. That rash commitment underpins the ancient Greek story of Iphigenia, and it is the basis too of Mozart’s opera Idomeneo: the victim turns out to be the hero’s daughter, and he must struggle with the existential moral conflict this provokes.

Handel’s deeply moving last oratorio Jephtha (1751) reworks the Old Testament version of this story, which sets the conflict in the uncomfortably timely context of a war between the Israelites and the Ammonites. Fortunately, Oliver Mears’s powerful new production for the Royal Opera does not labour the topical political point. With his designers Simon Lima Holdsworth and Ilona Karas, he sets the conflict as a clash of civilisations between the gloomy Israelities who live hemmed him by oppressive moving grey walls (inspired by Richard Serra’s sculptures) with scriptural inscriptions, and hedonistic Ammonites seemingly re-enacting scenes from Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress.

Mears is more interested in unpacking the tangle of conflicted characters and their response to the crisis. Handel’s oratorio, to a libretto by Thomas Morrell that significantly softens Jephtha’s warlike aggression in the Old Testament, was never designed to be staged; as is it dominated by dour, serious choruses, the show takes a while to ignite, especially as the chorus is often placed right at the back of the stage, making co-ordination difficult for expert conductor Laurence Cummings. But at the moment when Allan Clayton’s Jephtha prizes the huge walls apart to reveal Jennifer France’s Iphis in a gleam of white light (design by Fabiana Piccioli), the emotional conflict is set, heightened by Handel’s powerful central quartet O spare your daughter.

Here Alice Coote’s Storgè, the tortured mother of Iphis, and Cameron Shahbazi’s Hamor, her love, both conspire with Brindley Sherratt’s Zebul to persuade Jephtha back from his vow. But he is stubbornly faithful to what he regards as the only meaning of the text he has signed. More remarkably, the innocent Iphis herself is so resigned to her fate that she seems positively furious when at the crucial moment an Angel appears (the excellent treble Ivo Clark) to say that all she needs to do is remain a virgin and dedicate her life to God.

There is quite a mix of styles in the show. Always a vivid actor, Clayton is vocally at his strongest when most forceful, in his bleak recitative Deeper and deeper still, less comfortable in the lyrical vision of Waft her angels through the skies. Coote almost explodes with fury at her husband’s stubbornness. France is a rhapsodic and heartfelt Iphis, while Shahbazi’s eloquent countertenor Hamor seems in the final moments to make Iphis throw her dedication to God aside and elope with him.

Cummings draws strongly profiled playing from the Opera House Orchestra, and the chorus emerges from its gloom to invade the aisles for the final chorus, while reams of paper – useless vows indeed – rain down from the heavens. 

In rep until Nov 24. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk