Glyndebourne is about to play host to the 100th performance of Sir Peter Hall’s iconic staging of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, giving another generation the chance to fall under the spell of a piece of operatic history. Few of the cast and crew of this season’s run can have been born by the time of the original opening night in 1981, certainly not the children, whose parents the show quite possibly predates. Nevertheless, Britten’s most playful opera in what is widely acclaimed as its definitive iteration, continues to have audiences in its thrall. As the house lights went down on performance number 95, the rapt silence from the auditorium (rare anywhere) was spine-tingling.
We begin where all stories find their mojo: in the woods. John Bury’s enchanted forest looms gradually out of the silence, as fresh and potent as it ever was, the dark foliage shape-shifting as the overture’s unmooring low portamenti slide us deeper and deeper into the uncanny. All ruffs, gauzy wings and weird hair, the Beatonesque fairy band arrive and recite their incantations. (Fairy diction isn’t quite what it was in Britten’s day, but there are surtitles.) Paul Pyant’s mesmeric lighting once again turns the moonlit clearing to a brilliant silver, and so the stage is set for proud Tytania and jealous Oberon, all decked out in Bury’s glorious Elizabethan glitz.
Jennifer France was a tremendous Tytania, her bearing regal and mischievous by turns, her voice consistently and thrillingly diamantine: she turned Britten’s audacious octave leaps and coloratura twinklings into fly-by-night masterpieces of characterisation and control. Towering over her as Oberon, thanks in part to his enormous hair, Nils Wanderer certainly had the stature of a king, though his voice, supple and sinuous through Britten’s serpentine vocal lines, lacked the hard edge that would really put him in charge. Quieter than his rival’s, his is a power that insinuates rather than commands, and it’s here that we might wonder if there’s an even darker part of the woods that both Hall and Britten elected not to enter. For contemporary audiences, Wanderer’s inveigling demeanour in this role combined with the question over the Changeling Boy introduced an incipient creepiness. And then of course there’s Puck, amoral, innocent (Britten’s description) and eager-to-please.
Sir Peter Hall had sufficient previous with the bard’s midsummer madness to lean heavily into the get-out clause “If we shadows have offended…” etc. The fairies are weird, the mechanicals funny. Britten found the ridiculous in the sublime with some wonderful moments of orchestral slapstick – perfectly choreographed here – as the mismatched lovers wake to their various new and surprising inamorati. Alexandra Lowe and Stephanie Wake-Edwards brought the long-simmering boarding school cage-fight to Helena and Hermia respectively: the pause for breath as the word “puppet” drops was a delicious bit of comic delivery. In his Glyndebourne debut, Joshua Bloom was magnificent as Bottom; self-important, blissfully unaware of the needs of an audience, but with a genial giant of a voice that captivated with its charm even from inside a donkey’s head with moving ears! Vocally athletic, James Way engagingly imbued the reluctant Flute with increasing stage confidence as Thisbe while Alex Otterburn’s Starveling made a lovely job of being the moon and is surely the best dog-handler outside Crufts. Alasdair Elliot’ Snout made an outstanding wall.
The Glyndebourne Sinfonia needed no transformation but under the magic wand of conductor Bertie Baigent, they were on dazzling form, navigating with éclat this most volatile of scores as it skitters about from toybox to fairy-tale romance, from slapstick to sorcery. Britten’s romantic writing can sometimes sound a little austere: not here, there was a full and generous warmth to the passages that balanced the eerie chill of the moonlit forest.
A hundred nights of this Dream is a thing to be celebrated, and the lasting spell cast by some of the 20th century’s finest theatrical and musical magicians is to be cherished. New generations will find their own ways to explore the contradictions lurking at the heart of fairyland. Those woods may not always be as lovely, but they are dark and deep.
