A composer who has lost his mojo, a soprano cast low by a sex scandal, a bishop climbing the ecclesiastical greasy pole and a German king of England doing his best to fit in. Such are the ingredients stirred into US playwright Tim Slover’s A Joyful Noise, the story of the making of Handel’s Messiah pitched in the key of comic drama.

We meet Handel (played by Nicholas Papademetriou) suffering the arrows of ill health and spiralling debt. Queen Caroline, the wife of King George II and Handel’s staunch backer, has recently died, and his operas are on the nose with novelty-seeking Londoners. The curtain dropped on his most recent project, the opera Deidamia, after just three performances.

Angela Johnston and Nicholas Papademetriou in A Joyful Noise. Photo © JN Foyer Photography

Enter Charles Jennens (Mason Phoumirath), a landowner-librettist with a new idea: the story of Christ told in oratorio form, with a text compiled from fragments of biblical scripture. Hardly a money spinner, you’d think, and the anxious Handel can’t see the point. Moreover, the church – embodied by Bishop Egerton (Matthew Abotomey) – is outraged, and the two women...