Staging opera outdoors in Ireland is always a gamble. On the opening night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Blackwater Valley Opera Festival, the weather did its best to upstage the performers. Yet even a persistent downpour couldn’t fully dampen the spirit of this atmospheric if uneven production of Britten’s fairy-haunted Shakespeare adaptation, set amid the historic grounds of Lismore Castle.
Patrick Mason’s direction is a tale of two Elizabethan worlds. The fairies inhabit a stylised Tudor England – ruffed, bewigged and be-hatted, sometimes wreathed in laurel – while the mortals tread the more familiar terrain of post-war Britain. It’s a conceptually tidy vision, with Catherine Fay’s costumes offering visual clarity if not quite enchantment: a cricket bat for a young lover, bowler hats and waistcoats for the rustics and a wire-gauze donkey head for a workmanlike Bottom. Yet Mason’s interpretation leans towards separation rather than symbiosis and one longed for greater intertwining between the opera’s magical and mortal realms.
Paul Keogan’s sparse set design – two glowing door frames and a central four-poster bed – suggested a dreamscape on a budget, leaving much to the imagination. Fortunately, Britten’s finely-wrought orchestration brought texture where the stage design could not. Under David Brophy’s baton, the Irish Chamber Orchestra revealed much of the score’s mystery and playfulness: sul ponticello strings whispered beneath fairy mischief, while raspy brass and burbling bassoons punctuated the comic interludes. There were, however, a few lapses in ensemble precision, particularly in the brass and woodwinds, not always helped by the competing soundtrack of rainfall.
Vocal performances were solid if not uniformly spellbinding. Ami Hewitt’s Tytania shimmered with crystalline clarity, particularly in “Come, now a roundel”, though a touch more sensuality wouldn’t have gone amiss in her Act 2 “Hail, mortal, hail”. Iestyn Morris made an elegant Oberon in appearance, and his countertenor possessed a delicate silvery sheen, though it lacked projection, frequently overwhelmed by both orchestra and the elements. Barry McGovern’s Puck favoured gravitas over glee; more Lear’s Fool than Shakespeare’s airy sprite, his menace overshadowed mischief.