Turning Shakespeare into a juke-box musical

Opera A Fairy Queen Iford Arts

This is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but not as you know it. Henry Purcell wrote songs for a bastardised version of Shakespeare’s comedy and called this “semi-opera”

The Fairy-Queen – as such, it has recently been successfully performed at Glyndebourne. But now the Early Opera Company, under the American conductor-director Tim Nelson, has gone one better in adapting this adaptation, mashing up Shakespeare’s text further (with additional verse by Marlowe and Donne) and inserting songs from other areas of Purcell’s oeuvre, rather in the manner of a juke-box musical. This cavalier attitude towards original intentions was common in baroque theatre, where concepts of copyright and authenticity were so weak, and there’s no reason why it couldn’t work today. But Nelson’s alterations and accretions are too busy, sacrificing all the Purcellian sense of elegance, eroticism and wit to an over-excitable desire to please. Worse, the delicacy of relationship between story and song is lost, because the grafting of musical numbers seems so clumsy and arbitrary: some have been rearranged, others are truncated.

Visual excess adds to the woes. The designer takis (sic) has cluttered the stage with potted plants: the result looks like a Harrods Christmas window, in which expensive bling replaces simple magic.

Over more than three tedious hours, chunks of the play are delivered within a framework in which the fairies enact the rude mechanicals and Titania and Oberon incorporate the roles of Hippolyta and Theseus.

The finely honed playing of the Early Opera Company’s ensemble gives steady pleasure, but this overegged vaudeville won’t rank in my book as one of Iford’s successes. Until Aug 3. Tickets: 01225 448844; ifordarts.org.uk