Loyola – Arcola Theatre, London

Composer: Domenico Zipoli

Director: Michael Walling

Loyola is a long-lost baroque opera about the final days of sixteenth-century Spanish saint, Ignatius Loyola, as he lies on his deathbed. It’s by eighteenth-century Italian composer Domenico Zipoli and premieres at the Arcola Theatre as part of the Grimeborn Opera Festival.

It’s a curious piece, much of its interest lying in the fact that Zipoli, a Jesuit missionary in Argentina, combined European baroque with Indigenous musical traditions. Lovely scoring for percussion and pipes works well alongside the more traditional sounds of the strings. The small band – Johnny Figueroa Rodriguez (percussion), Pablo Tejedor-Gutiérrez (cello and gamba) and Fábio Fernandes (guitar, theorbo) – are attentive to the score’s often dance-like sounds. So although the work focuses on Loyola’s death, the overall mood is one of celebration and joy.

Director Michael Walling overcomes the issue of how to inform the audience about the work and its context by playing a specially written mini-documentary when the performance starts. Talking heads, including a Jesuit priest and the enthusiastic academic, Felipe Fernández Armesto, bring us up to speed. There’s a slight problem here with sound quality. It can be difficult to hear Fernández Armesto when his words are accompanied by music.

The standout scenes are strangely comic ones – first when Mensajero 1 and 2, here playing modern-day nurse and doctor, attempt to rehabilitate the truculent Loyola with some physiotherapy. Then comes the splendid entrance of Victor Sgarbi, purporting to be a priest. Something about Sgarbi’s brimming energy signals he’s not who he says he is, as he unpacks his crucifix and chalice from his suitcase with all the aplomb of a travelling salesman. And indeed it transpires that he’s Demonio, preying on the dying to try to win their immortal soul for Satan. Michael Walling’s direction makes a lot of the wonderfully surreal action that follows the discovery of Demonio’s true identity, which ends with nurse and doctor trying to garrotte him with the line from Loyola’s drip. It’s somewhere between medieval mystery place and pantomime.

The rest of the production, however, is necessarily rather static, as Loyola remains on his deathbed, singing plaintively about his longing to die. Rafael Montero, who plays Loyola, is founder of El Parnaso Hyspano, the chamber group dedicated to the performance of early Hispanic music. For this he deserves credit. His performance, alas, is somewhat underpowered. Overall, the exact issue at stake here is not quite clear. Is Loyola wrong to seek death, or is it that he doesn’t want to abandon his flock? At any rate, with the arrival of Francis Xavier, he knows he leaves his missionary work in safe hands.

Reviewed on 11 August 2023