(photo by Michael Cooper)
Caught in a trap
by Shannon Christy
"Hell has no fury like a woman scorned” - Virgil may have had his own twisted purposes for writing of Dido’s rage against Aeneas in the Aeneid but the idea certainly resonates with the hapless Roberto Devereux, played sublimely by Leonardo Capalbo, who is sacrificed simply because he doesn’t love the right women. Never mind that the right woman is the Queen of England and that the woman he does love is married, the basic primus of not scorning a woman remains.
The story is set at the end of the Elizabethan age and involves Roberto Devereux, a cocky youth’s trial for treason by men who are simply jealous. His guilt or innocence is never actually tried on stage: the central question is does Roberto love Queen Elizabeth I and the answer is a resounding no.
This is an interesting piece because it plays with the image of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth, performed magnificently by Sondra Radvanovsky, and the influence of both her parents in forming her. For instance, on one side you have a woman who has her passions and truly cares and wants to be cared for which are traits historians used to describe her mother Anne Boleyn but on the other hand you have a woman who has successfully put a number of men she was rumoured to have had affairs with to death for treason, a trait she shared with her father who is infamous for radically getting rid of wives who failed to produce male heirs.
