The crowd go bonkers for the crazy Orlando as dull old reason is pitted against the power of love.

Theatre Royal, Hobart

March 28, 2014

Handel’s Orlando comes from 1733, his final operatic period before Italian fun gave way to the more sober format of the English oratorio. That transition seems to be reflected in this enlightenment tale based on Ariosto where a ‘wise’ mage (of sorts) rescues his favourite hero from the chaotic, irrational throes of Cupid’s darts. In other words, in Orlando it’s reason versus love and we’re clearly meant to be rooting for reason.

What Chas Rader-Shieber’s neatly conceived, enchanting production for New York’s Glimmerglass Festival (now making landfall at Hobart Baroque) does so cleverly, however, is to show us just how much more enjoyable love can be – and it does it with grace, style and a sly smile, backed up by some excellent performances. Indeed, the director almost manages to make you forget that it’s only because the characters keep conveniently losing each other out there in the woods that anything much happens in Orlando at all.

Rader-Shieber sets it all in a kind of enlightenment hospital for the lovesick, wittily represented by one poor patient lying...