Hill’s staging of Britten’s beguiling opera serves up fresh fairy magic
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Scottish Opera
★★★★★
Shakespearean opera is a notoriously tricky art form, and the genre since Verdi’s great Otello and Falstaff is littered with noble failures. But there have been recent triumphs with Thomas Adès’s Tempest and Brett Dean’s Hamlet; the next opera, later this year, from the prolific John Adams is to be Antony and Cleopatra.
Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has an ambivalent place in this history. Written in a hurry to meet a deadline, it is exceptionally faithful to the play, and has been criticised (by Auden among others) for its English cosiness. But Dominic Hill’s subtle and interesting staging in this new production for Scottish Opera uncovers some fresh layers in the piece, and it is very well projected by the entire company.
It takes a while to find its voice: Act One, in which Oberon plots to steal a changeling boy (here a tiny child puppet) beloved of his wife Tytania, sets up the three worlds of the opera: the court, the rustics, and the fairies. It emerges, perhaps deliberately, from a greyish dream in a mirrored room, and lacks character and focus.
But, like some dreams, the clarity increases and Act Two is vividly drawn as Oberon’s plotting with the juice of his magic flower causes confusion among the humans, and makes the worlds of the fairies and the rustics collide.
Lawrence Zazzo’s decadent, almost Dracula-like Oberon presides, while Michael Guest, more punk than Puck, is a constantly active physical presence with a body double who flies around the stage. Perhaps it’s true that the
music for the four mixed-up lovers is less striking than the rest but as Hermia and Helena, Lea Shaw and Charlie Drummond project it strongly, as do Lysander and Demetrius (Elgan Llŷr Thomas and Jonathan Mcgovern in their Athenian pyjamas).
It is striking that here at the heart of the opera, Britten brings his most sensual music to the most transgressive relationship – that of the Fairy Queen Tytania gloriously sung by Catriona Hewitson, with the translated ass of Nick Bottom, a spectacular tour-de-force by David Shipley who dominates his every scene with total clarity. The fairies, musty and cobwebbed, are individually characterised and sharply sung
Using beds in the setting of this opera is nothing new – Robert Carsen based an entire staging around them, while Christopher Alden’s version was set in a sinister boarding school. Designer Tom Piper’s conceit is that of aptly dream-like airborne beds that float above the scene, framed within a
proscenium arch, whose sheets, in an eloquent end to Act Two, become swathing bands for the four lovers as they reunite.
In Act Three, the ever-reliable Jonathan Lemalu as Theseus, with Annie Reilly as Hippolyta, goodhumouredly host the rustics’ play. Helped by Britten’s economically sharp musical characterisations, this is quite as hilarious a travesty of the drama of Pyramus and Thisbe as you could hope to see in any spoken version of the play.
The first production of this opera in 1960 was squeezed into the tiny Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh; here, in the wide-open spaces of the Theatre Royal pit, under excellent conductor Stuart Stratford, the orchestral sounds blossom atmospherically, especially the chiming percussion and the slumbering, sliding strings.
And at the close, Britten pulls out of his endless imagination the lilting, hypnotically memorable final ensemble, and the dream evaporates like the balloons that here float aloft. We meet at break of day, and life goes on, but we have sensed another world of possibilities.
The most transgressive affair – that of Bottom and Tytania – gets the most sensual music