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.