Wilton’s Music corridor,London
The first modern performance of this rediscovered curio – composer unknown – satirises the failings of mental health care with admirable imagination There’s much approximately the 17th-century Italian comic opera The Hospital that we dont know, including the name of its composer and where and when it was first performed; but the libretto seems to be the work of satirist Antonio Abati, or who took as his subject a group of people all suffering from some form of mental illness. The baroque collective Solomon’s Knot here presents its first modern production in a staging by James Hurley that makes it seem like an operatic version of Carry On Matron,only darker.
Even the original clearly attempted something more worthwhile than mocking the afflicted, but Hurley’s staging contextualises the single act with a spoken prologue and epilogue in which the symbolic figure of Health is presented as a government minister heard on the radio attempting to defend an unpopular NHS policy to a rowdy House of Commons.
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Source: theguardian.com