It’s hard to be sure what Jack Furness wants audiences to take from his new staging of Hansel und Gretel. He is one of this country’s most innovative young directors whose every production is a stimulating prospect, but this account for the RAM of Humperdinck’s esurient opera is an unappetising mess. The search for clues yields little beyond a remark in the programme by Dr Christopher White, the new head of Royal Academy Opera, about the work’s dark concern with “the fear of that which is ‘other’ and the questioning of the family dynamic”. Well, perhaps.
Here's what we have: bare white walls, schoolgirls in smocks and several allusions to Gretel’s sexual awakening. If you thought the children’s father (powerfully sung by Conrad Chatterton) was a good man at heart, think again. Here he is a domestic abuser who attacks his daughter for daring to menstruate and a vicious monster from whom she cowers in terror. It is pure dystopia – The Hunger Games meets The Handmaid’s Tale – and it doesn’t work for a minute.
Furness’ insurmountable problem is the sheer beauty of the composer’s post-Wagnerian score. It bursts with colour and textural delights, yet all we get on Alex Berry’s white box set to represent the gingerbread house is a flood of red cellophane… Oh, what’s that you say? The Witch’s house is a sexual symbol? Well, tuck in, kids.
I’ve never appreciated the fashion for casting a male singer as the Witch, but in the context of this production it makes sense to do so. Konstantinos Akritides plays him as a burly, moustachioed bully who would probably have got on well with the children’s father if they’d met. The third adult character, of course, is their mother, but she doesn’t seem to interest Furness very much. That’s a shame because Ella Oharek-Coddington gave a poised portrayal.
For Anna-Helena MacLachlan as Hansel and Binny Supin Yang as Gretel, no praise is too great. Both singers can command a stage as confidently as they can sing, and they transcend all the obstacles that Furness and choreographer Rebecca Melzer place before them. It helps that the Royal Academy Sinfonia under Johann Stuckenbruck delivered such a rapt and, yes, richly coloured account of Derek Clark’s orchestral reduction.
Furness has such a fine understanding of stagecraft that even a rare failure such as this Hansel und Gretel can yield a pleasant surprise. The moment Berry’s stage opens out from cramped indoors to a widescreen exterior is beautifully aligned to the music and belongs in a more ambitious production than this. As for the Sand Man and Dew Fairy (Grace Hope-Gill and Caroline Blair, both vocally impeccable) they complete a company without a weak link. And that’s without reference to the alternate cast. What marvels we find in our music colleges! The third star is for them.
