Garsington Opera’s new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night's Dream, designed and directed by Netia Jones, has an intriguing single set. A large tree has burst through the stage floor, tipping up a grand piano, its leafy branches providing shelter from which Puck makes his entrance. Centre stage is a low black austere couch, which Tytania and later Bottom recline upon. At the rear three telescopes are placed, while stage left is occupied by a large armillary sphere. Presumably these astronomical objects are there because the opera refers often to the moon. The King and Queen of the fairies are “ill-met by moonlight”, and moonshine itself is personified in the rustics’ play. But apart from the solitary tree, we do not seem to be in the woodland setting required, and those objects are scientific, whereas a fairy kingdom employs what mortals call magic.
The set is open at the back for Act 1, so some Garsington greenery is seen, which reminded us this opera house is in a real woodland setting. A large flat disc is suspended at the rear of the stage, onto which video is projected, sometimes of heavenly bodies. But we also see flowing inkblots forming images as in a Rorschach test – distracting us from the stage action while we wonder what the shapes suggest. The lighting is most effective in the last act, evoking the forest floor or Theseus’s mansion.
If we needed more belief in the work’s central concept of a supernatural domain interacting in the doings of mortals, it was provided by the excellent fairies of the Garsington Opera Youth Company. Their varied but uniformly black costumes enabled then to be both individuals and members of a cohort, occasionally popping their heads up through holes in the stage. Other costumes were contemporary. The adult Puck sported a green suit; the young lovers attired for public school (satchel and pale blazer for Lysander); Oberon, King of Shadows, darkly clad. His wolf’s head, doffed and donned at entrances and exits, serving only to mitigate the grotesqueness of Bottom’s ass’s head by making it less singular. Why high-ranking ladies entered with a train still attached to a bolt of cloth, which was then cut to length by an attendant, I am at a loss to reveal.
The characters – there are 19 named parts (including the six rustics and the four fairies who attend on Bottom) – are mostly well directed in their interactions. There is sometimes more tension than usual, such as when Oberon and Tytania in Act 3 still seem far from “new in amity”. Bottom is less central than he should be; the rustics’ admiration, certain the Duke will award him “sixpence a day for playing Pyramus”, usually invests him with charisma, but that is absent here, although Richard Burkhard sang the role well. Also the stage business with Flute stuck in the armillary sphere distracted from the main action. These rustics “never laboured in their minds before”, thus offer verbal comedy. But the rustic’s play is very well directed, and a white “Wall” who is plastered so rigidly in his “lime and rough-cast” he is unable to form his "chink", did bring effective text-derived physical comedy.
There is certainly some good singing. Iestyn Davies offers an Oberon whose “I know a bank” shows him at his most sweetly Purcellian, though we never hear the “surpassing fell and wrath” manner the fairies fear. Lucy Crowe’s Tytania is a good match, though her lovely “Come now a roundel”, which had very neat melisma, did approach a hoot in the tricky high parts. Most importantly, the pair supplied that literal otherworldly atmosphere Britten wanted from rarified countertenor and coloratura sounds. The four lovers were all very good too, the pick on this particular evening the Lysander of Caspar Singh, and the Hermia of rich-voiced mezzo-soprano Stephanie Wake-Edwards. The rustics made a plausible group, acting and singing well, and if I single out the Flute/Thisbe of James Way, it is because Britten’s Donizetti parody "These lily lips" gives him the best opportunity of all, and he makes the most of it. The “fairy band” – Wormsley locals, not formally trained singers – were excellent: Britten would have loved that link to the community.
If enchantment is sometimes in short supply on the stage, it oozes from the pit, for conductor Douglas Boyd expertly directs the Philharmonia Orchestra. Britten wrote for just 27 players, so there is nowhere to hide in the distinct layers of instrumentation with which the composer paints the fairies, lovers and rustic groups. Trumpeter Jason Evans had an excellent night, his playing more athletic than Puck himself. But every musician contributed to this atmospheric score, from the opening glissandi to the closing Scotch snap of the fairies’ blessing of the house.
