Cabaret meets Gilbert and Sullivan: Die Fledermaus at The Grange

With the bicentennial of Johann Strauss II coming up in October, it’s unsurprising that the Grange Festival has chosen to stage Die Fledermaus, his most famous operetta and one of the most famous by any composer. The Champagne-fuelled plot and the plethora of the Waltz King’s instantly recognisable tunes make the piece the perfect complement to an elegant summer picnic lawn.

There are pitfalls, however. The characterisation and humour of Die Fledermaus are very much of their time and place, namely Belle Époque Vienna, and cannot be dropped unaltered onto a modern audience. However alluring and well performed the music – and the music is very alluring – avoiding those pitfalls requires choices to be made. For the most part, last night’s performance was musically unimpeachable, but there were questionable choices in several areas.

Sylvia Schwartz carried the show as Rosalinde, with a pretty timbre and no fear of performing leaps into the high register while staying perfectly in character and displaying some classy comic timing. Andrew Hamilton was adept at patter while playing the chinless wonder that is this production’s interpretation of Eisenstein. Trystan Llŷr Griffiths burst repeatedly and tunefully into Italian opera hits as Alfred; Ben McAteer played the manipulative Dr Falke with a warm voice and comic relish; Darren Jeffrey entertained as prison governor Frank. Only Ellie Laugharne seemed miscast as Adele, her voice sounding a size too weighty for the soubrette role. In short, a solid singing cast.

Paul Daniel and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra provided plenty of vigour, plenty of good orchestral timbre and, at least from Act 2 on, the requisite accenting and swing. But the sound lacked the airy lightness that one hopes for in Strauss: the waltzes whirled energetically but lacked glitter or freedom.

The lack of ironic lightness was mirrored in the staging. After an Act 1 placed conventionally in the Eisensteins’ posh living room, director Paul Curran focuses on decadence, transporting us from the end-of-empire Viennese version to the altogether different decadence of 1930s Berlin. Designer Gary McCann turns Prince Orlofsky’s ballroom into an updated version of the KitKat Club in Cabaret, with dark lighting, a lot of risqué lingerie on show and no shortage of sexual shenanigans.

The concept isn’t necessarily a bad one, but it misses the mark for a number of reasons. The first is the use of John Mortimer’s English translation/adaptation from 1989, which is showing its age. Above all else, the translation prioritises clever rapid-fire wordplay and it makes the piece sound like souped-up Gilbert and Sullivan. That’s not so much of a problem in a conventional song-and-dance Act 1, but it feels horribly mismatched to the attempts at Cabaret-style edginess: the words fail to match the mood, taking the fizz out of the Champagne. And the translation is unkind to the singers, who all struggled to a greater or lesser extent to make the words sound naturally fitted to the music.

The result is a performance that doesn’t seem to know what it’s trying to be: G&S slapstick (with some awful comedic accents on display), disturbing edginess à la Cabaret, or carefree Viennese glamour. In the end, in spite of creditable efforts from everyone, the production falls between these different stools.

But I’ll conclude with the best moment of the evening. By tradition, Act 3 opens with an improvised monologue by the jailer Frosch, a spoken rather than a sung role. It’s generally a good moment for a spot of topical amusement, but rarely can a comedian have stolen the show to the extent that cabaret artist Myra Dubois achieved. Casting herself as “the widowed Mrs Frosch” (don’t ask what happened to her late husband) and looking eerily reminiscent of Dame Edna Everage, Dubois poured out a torrent of musical, political and burlesque gags – carefully calibrated for the audience and brilliantly delivered. By the end, the fourth wall had been reduced to a pile of rubble and the audience to gibbering hilarity. So at least one part of the evening really made the Champagne corks pop.