PUCK BRINGS THE HOUSE DOWN

Composer: Benjamin Britten, based on the Shakespeare play Director: Peter Hall Revival director: Lynne Hockney

We are haunted this year by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. I have seen three productions already, and missed three more – all of which were strikingly different. But Lynne Hockney’s “moving” revival of Peter Hall’s 1981 production at Glyndebourne is certainly “the most sinister” I have seen. The opening scene takes the audience straight into the heart of the forest, using a series of glissando chords to establish the setting as one of “unearthly magic”. This is an opera that allowed Benjamin Britten not only to respond to Shakespeare but also to reveal the play’s “crepuscular strangeness” in a way that few productions do.

It’s not just the score that instils the otherworldly mood, said Barry Millington in the London Evening Standard. Hall’s “hallucinatory” sets, designed by the late John Bury, contain trees painted with dark greens, blues and silver, shafts of “criss-crossing moonlight”, and “extras shrouded in foliage”. To depict the approach of sunrise in Act Three, Bury uses huge mirrors to convey depth and luminosity, leaving the wood “bathed in a ravishing pale orange light”.

Unlike most other productions, there’s a “savage vindictiveness” in Britten’s Oberon, said Billington. Played by the excellent countertenor Tim Mead, he gloats over his plan to sprinkle a potion into Tytania’s eyes and fill her with “hateful fantasies”. Both Oberon and Tytania are “beautifully sung” by Mead and Kathleen Kim, said Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph. Mead is much more masculine, lustrous and vibrant than Alfred Deller, for whom the original role was conceived, and Kim is meticulous in capturing the “skittering diamantine staccato” that Britten scatters over her coloratura. But I would have liked a bit more bad temper and “wanton devilry”. It’s undoubtedly a strong ensemble, but the star of the show didn’t so much as sing a single note: 11-year-old David Evans, who plays Puck. “A tiny impish scamp, he delivered his lines with nonchalant authority, turned impressive cartwheels to boot, and almost brought the house down with his curtain call.”