A scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Photo: James Glossop
An attempted elopement to evade a prohibitive law, an abduction of a human infant by supernatural beings, the transformation of a man into an animal, and the god-like coercion of a spritely minion by the King of the Fairies. These are just some of the dark imaginings that are laced through Shakespeare’s famous comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
It is little wonder, then, that the play, and indeed Benjamin Britten’s 1960 opera based upon it, end with the aforementioned subjugated sprite, Puck, apologising for any offence that may have been caused. As with the Bard’s other great comedies (take Twelfth Night, for example), the humour is attended by other, darker and more serious matters.
These dramatic contrasts and combinations are in abundant evidence in director Dominic Hill’s new production of Britten’s adaptation for Scottish Opera. From the very outset, the director’s setting of the piece is paradoxically bleak and beautiful.
That it is so is down, in no small measure, to the superb work of set and costume designer Tom Piper and lighting designer Lizzie Powell. Through the carefully lit gloom of the woods, sleeping beds are suspended in mid-air, while the hyper-active Puck (the excellent Michael Guest) flies chaotically through the air and tumbles clumsily to the ground.
Much of the action of the opera – from the corporeal shenanigans of the confused Athenian lovers to the spectral interventions of the fairies – takes place within the golden frame of a glass cube. Appearing, simultaneously, like both a stage-within-a-stage and a beguiling box of charms, it serves both as an enchanted forest and an Athenian palace.
The dark-yet-comic atmosphere of the production connects perfectly with Britten’s music, which (like the libretto, co-authored by Britten and Peter Pears) is splendidly faithful to Shakespeare’s play. By turns, ethereal and martial, premonitory and romantic, Britten’s score (which is given gorgeous expression by the orchestra of Scottish Opera under the baton of Stuart Stratford) is a masterpiece of modern dramatic music.
A universally impressive cast is led by American countertenor Lawrence Zazzo as Oberon, King of the Fairies, and Scottish soprano Catriona Hewitson (a Scottish Opera Emerging Artist for 2021/22), as the fairy queen Tytania. The sheer heights to which Zazzo’s extraordinary voice ascends make him the perfect choice for the otherworldly Oberon.
Both in performance and in costume, Zazzo embodies the magical, playful and cruel aspects of his character. Hewitson, too, is a picture of gorgeously-sung confidence, whether she is commanding the wonderful chorus of children (who represent the fairy army) or is cursed to fall in love with the ill-fated Bottom after he has been transformed into an ass.
Hill’s staging is marvellously funny in its comical moments. David Shipley’s playing of Bottom is gloriously lively and hilarious, while the amdram troupe’s “tedious brief scene” is a nicely-executed hoot.
Above all, the production is blessed with a constant and captivating vision. This Dream is a memorably complete rendering of Britten’s opera.
At Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, March 1-5: scottishopera.org.uk
This review was originally published in the Sunday National on February 27, 2022
A gloriously absurd exploration of mental health treatment
Medicine,
Traverse Theatre
Doppler,
Newhailes House and Gardens
Still,
Traverse Theatre
Falstaff,
Festival Theatre
Reviews by Mark Brown
Domhnall Gleeson in Medicine. Photo: Jess Shurte
Seasoned patrons of the Edinburgh festivals have fond memories of The Walworth Farce, the hit play of the 2007 Fringe by the acclaimed Irish playwright Enda Walsh. From the pen of the author of the tragicomic Disco Pigs and the screenplay for Steve McQueen’s searing film Hunger, the play, which was staged at the Traverse Theatre, was an astonishingly hilarious and deeply moving reflection on the Irish experience of emigration.
Walsh’s latest drama, Medicine (Traverse, until August 29), which is presented by Dublin-based theatre company Landmark Productions and the Galway International Arts Festival, is in a similar vein. It shares with The Walworth Farce a brilliant, bleak humour and a discernible nod towards the absurdism of the legendary dramatist Eugène Ionesco.
Playing as part of the Edinburgh International Festival programme, Medicine, in many ways, does for the subject of mental health what the earlier piece did for Irish migration. The play stars the exceptional Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson (of the Star Wars series and The Revenant fame) in the role of John Kane, a man who has been diagnosed with psychosis and, seemingly, incarcerated by the state.
From very early in the play we find ourselves in a world that is tipping vertiginously from something recognisably real into a darkly comic, absurdist fantasia. We see John wandering, in pyjamas and slippers, around the hospital gymnasium. The place is a mess, full of the debris of the previous night’s staff party.
Given that John is about to embark on his personal testimony, this speaks to a certain neglect of his mental well-being. This is as nothing, however, compared with the “treatment” to follow.
John’s testimony is being heard, not by mental health professionals, but by a pair of musical theatre performers, both of whom are called Mary. Played with sparkling intelligence and excoriating energy by Aoife Duffin and Clare Barrett, the Marys arrive in the guise of two old men (Duffin) and a lobster (Barrett).
John hears, and we hear, a disembodied, male voice enquiring about his well-being and eliciting his acceptance of his incarceration. Meanwhile (scripts of John’s, seemingly oft-repeated, testimony in their hands), the Marys take on a variety of grimly hilarious roles, including those of John’s terrifyingly neglectful parents.
The testimony itself includes an infant memory of being scalded and left to tumble to the floor from a “bath” in the kitchen sink. It also entails anguished recollections of a romantic attachment that was prevented, and, with it, John’s last chance at avoiding medical detention.
The increasingly manic and violent antics of the mutually antagonistic Marys imply that, if there is madness here, it resides not in John, but in his past life and in the world around him. That impression is strengthened immeasurably in the powerful, poetic monologues Walsh has written for John. In these moments, the utterly mesmerising Gleeson gives spine-tingling expression to the depths of the unfortunate man’s pain, disappointment and despair.
Excellently designed, with exceptional use of sound, voices and music (live and recorded), this production gives exquisite expression to another outstanding script by Enda Walsh.
Keith Fleming as Doppler. Photo: Duncan McGlynn
The madness of the world is also the subject of Fringe production Doppler (Newhailes House and Gardens, near Musselburgh, until August 23). An outdoor piece by Grid Iron theatre company, Scotland’s leading site-specific theatre company, the play takes us into the forest in pursuit of writer-director Ben Harrison’s adaptation of Norwegian author Erlend Loe’s acclaimed novel.
There, seated on logs (complete with cushions, I should add), Fringe-goers meet the titular protagonist (the ever-excellent Keith Fleming), a middle-class professional who has abandoned Oslo in favour of a life in the woods. Following a bang to the head in a cycling accident, Doppler sees with absolute clarity that his response to the greed and destructive consumption of late-capitalism must be to quit his job, abandon his family and live in a tent under a tree.
What unfolds is both wonderfully cartoonish and darkly comic. Having exhausted the food provided by foraging, Doppler turns from gatherer to hunter, killing a majestic elk (represented by a superb puppet by Fergus Dunnet). However, the animal has offspring which, riddled with guilt, Doppler adopts and names Bongo.
As Doppler navigates his new life, complete with bartering (including a “milk deal” with a suburban grocery employee), the tremendous Chloe-Ann Tylor and Sean Hay play an array of boldly-drawn characters, ranging from Doppler’s exasperated (yet remarkably patient) wife to forest homeowner (and disconcertingly proud, Norwegian son of a Wehrmacht soldier) Düsseldorf.
The beauty of Harrison’s clever production is that it creates a brilliant balance between the character of Doppler (as the fixed, if somewhat unhinged, centre of the story) and the other characters (such as Bozza, the consummately named posh, reactionary eccentric). While Fleming gives a performance that is a perfectly calibrated combination of plausible rationale and wide-eyed lunacy, Tylor and Hay are at liberty to play the orbiting characters as gloriously colourful caricatures.
This larger-than-life dimension to the piece is enhanced by the live sound effects and music, composed by David A. Pollock and performed by Nik Paget-Tomlinson. It is strengthened, too, by the smart, deceptively simple set and costume designs by Becky Minto.
For sure, 90 minutes sitting on a log (albeit padded) takes its toll on one’s rear. Also, the working conditions for the actors mean that costumes and props are muddied, when, naturalistically speaking, they shouldn’t be. These are mere trifles, however, when such an original, funny and thought-provoking piece of theatre is on offer.
If the new plays by Walsh and Harrison hit the mark, Still (Traverse, until August 22), the latest Fringe piece by Scotland-based playwright Frances Poet, sadly, does not. The drama offers a collection of converging stories: a woman confined to her home by chronic pain; a hungover man who finds himself, his mind a blank, on Portobello beach; a young woman watching her father die with late-stage dementia; and a young woman and her partner hurtling towards a difficult pregnancy.
Any one of these narratives could form the basis for a play. In attempting to fit all four together, Poet has ended up with a drama this is, paradoxically, overwrought and underwritten.
Running at a little over an hour-and-a-half, this awkwardly constructed piece, which is directed by Gareth Nicholls, gives none of its characters enough space to breathe. Indeed, it is reminiscent of many plays we have seen at the Traverse over the last 20 years, in seeming like a soap opera with a twist.
Such theatre works attempt to elevate thinly drawn issues of everyday life by enhancing them with action or language that wouldn’t be acceptable to the producers of run-of-the-mill, naturalistic TV dramas. They, nevertheless, remain moored to the predictable, unimaginative platitudes of realism.
Which is a great pity, as Nicholls has assembled a universally fantastic cast. Few Scottish theatre productions can boast a line-up that includes the likes of superb actor and singer Naomi Stirrat (Gilly, daughter of the man with advanced dementia), Mercy Ojelade (pregnant veterinary surgeon, Ciara) and Martin Donaghy (Ciara’s partner, Dougie).
Yet Poet’s variably written script gives the actors too little to do. The brilliant Gerry Mulgrew’s Mick (the confused hedonist) speaks largely in regurgitated jokes. The wonderful Molly Innes (fibromyalgia sufferer, Gaynor) is stuck with a narrow, disagreeable temperament that would be understandable in a person with her condition, but which makes for poor theatre.
Efforts are made to distinguish the play from an episode of River City. The compartmentalised set has a minimalist, semi-realist aspect. Outstanding theatre composer and musician Oğuz Kaplangi provides bespoke sound and music, which, too often, feels like it’s straining to give the play a rock ‘n’ roll dimension that it simply doesn’t have.
In fairness, Poet resolves the stories of two characters with real poignancy, but, by then, it is too late. Her play simply does not amount to the sum of its overloaded parts.
There’s nothing overloaded about David McVicar’s staging of Verdi’s final opera Falstaff (Festival Theatre, run ended). Directed and designed by McVicar for Scottish Opera and Santa Fe Opera, this hilarious, thoughtful and stylish production premiered in a purpose-built, outdoor theatre at Scottish Opera’s Glasgow studios before transferring to Edinburgh as part of the International Festival programme.
It was worth a second look to see (and hear) how the piece adapted to being played in a classical theatre. The cleverly constructed, two-level, wooden structure (complete with gantry and balcony) that was made for the Glasgow shows sits on the Festival Theatre stage more comfortably than one might have expected.
The theatre’s acoustics make it easier to understand what is being sung (in a libretto that has been translated into English); although surtitles (which were necessarily absent in Glasgow) also assist on that score. The cast, led by the gloriousRoland Wood in the title role, is as wonderful as ever, as are McVicar’s spectacular costumes.
We can only hope that, following its shows in New Mexico next year, this magnificent Verdi has a future life on Scottish stages.
These reviews were originally published in the Sunday National on August 15, 2021
Louise Winter, Roland Wood and Sionea Gwen Davies. Photo: James Glossop
Scottish Opera has been a veritable powerhouse of artistic creativity throughout the pandemic. On screen and outdoor stage, no company has done more to keep the artistic flame burning during the last, spirit-sapping 16 months.
Impressive though this programme has been, however, none of it could quite prepare us for the company’s latest production, a new staging of Verdi’s final opera, Falstaff. Directed and designed by Sir David McVicar, it is presented in a huge, gazebo-style outdoor auditorium in the car park of Scottish Opera’s Glasgow production studios.
The show is played on a large, purpose-built wooden stage upon which sits a lovely and brilliantly functional wooden structure in which multiple staircases lead to and from a gantry and a balcony. A co-production with Santa Fe Opera in the United States, it needs the space that this bespoke stage provides.
The on-going plague may have necessitated an outdoor production (although it does transfer to the, no doubt carefully physically distanced, Festival Theatre in Edinburgh next month), but this has not shrunk the director’s ambition.
McVicar has relocated the opera, in which the reprobate knight Sir John Falstaff attempts to defraud two married ladies of Windsor by way of seduction, from the early-15th century (when Falstaff appears in Shakespeare’s plays) to 1620. He has done so, he has explained, in order to cast Falstaff as a man out of his time.
This Sir Jack is an Elizabethan who has outlived his creator, the Bard of Stratford, by four years. A considerable 17 years into the rule of James I and VI, he is still unable to adjust to the social mores of Jacobean England.
All of which requires, and is given, the full operatic treatment. The public health emergency might require that the amplified orchestra plays from inside the studio building, but what we see on stage is genuinely spectacular.
Arrigo Boito’s libretto (which is sung here in English) draws upon all three of the Shakespeare plays in which Falstaff appears: namely Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and, more substantially, The Merry Wives of Windsor. From the dingy denizens of the Garter Inn (the down-at-heel hostelry that Falstaff calls home) to a yellow-attired housemaid, who is clearly inspired by Vermeer, McVicar’s visualisation of the tale is gloriously vivid.
The superb cast, led, in the title role, by the fabulous baritone Roland Wood, gives us a high-octane rendering of the opera, with all the colour and rumbustious humour Verdi intended. New Zealand baritone Phillip Rhodes, as the outraged husband Ford and his disguised alter-ego Mr Brook, captures, in song and gesture, the power and energetic humour of his character’s misguided suspicion.
The wonderful soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn sings the wronged, but revenged, Alice Ford with great emotional depth and supple versatility. Wood himself is absolutely masterful in both the resonating power and the glorious absurdity with which he imbues his character. This Falstaff, even in the midst of his humiliation, seems to be recalling the virility of his youth.
McVicar may be working, Shakespeare’s Globe-style, on an empty stage, but he fills it, moment-by-moment, with fabulous colour and imaginative panache. The final scene, in which we witness a midnight masquerade in Windsor Park, offers a delightful carousel of costumed characters, including a deliciously playful rendering of a bird-headed figure from Hieronymus Bosch’s great triptych The Temptation of St Anthony.
This is opera as the perfect antidote to the pandemic. It will, surely, be the toast of the Edinburgh International Festival next month.
Falstaff is at Scottish Opera Studios, Glasgow until July 17, and Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, August 8-14: scottishopera.org.uk and eif.co.uk
This review was originally published in the Sunday National on July 11, 2021
Fergus Wood, Sally Swanson and Roland Wood in Scottish Opera’s Falstaff. Photo: James Glossop
No-one would suggest that David McVicar has the ideal conditions for his pandemic-era return to live opera. His new rendering of Verdi’s Falstaff, which he has both directed and designed, premieres, not in a theatre, but in a huge gazebo in the car park of Scottish Opera’s production studios in Glasgow.
The orchestra plays from inside the studio building, with the huge roller doors open, exposing only conductor Stuart Stratford to the physically distanced audience. Such conditions, needless to say, require that the music be amplified.
The production is similar, in many ways, to Roxana Haines’s wonderfully rough-and-ready staging of La bohème for Scottish Opera last autumn. The crucial difference, however, is that, whereas Haines’s Puccini embraced its status as an opera of relative poverty, McVicar’s Falstaff (a co-production with Santa Fe Opera in the United States) is a well-resourced work of opulent beauty.
The opera (based on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and here sung in English translation) is played on a large, fabulously crafted wooden stage, which is dominated by a superb, two-level structure, complete with gantry and balcony. This splendid stage-upon-a-stage, with its numerous stairways for exit and entrance, is both visually impressive and, in the absence of the wings of a conventional theatre stage, cleverly utilitarian.
From the moment Roland Wood’s tremendously corpulent Sir John Falstaff is rolled onto the stage, lying on the large bed he rents at the Garter Inn, one senses that we are in for something special. As he wards off Aled Hall’s delightfully pompous Dr Caius (who suspects, with good reason, that Falstaff and his friends have robbed him), Wood inhabits entirely the role of the titular miscreant knight.
The English baritone expresses perfectly Falstaff’s ludicrous vanity, cruelty and, crucially, also his pathos. The drama and humour of Wood’s playing, as his character embarks on his shameful quest to defraud two well-heeled wives of Windsor, is matched entirely by the richness and power of his singing.
McVicar has moved the tale forward more than 200 years to Jacobean England, reflecting, the director has explained, his interest in the possibilities of Falstaff as an Elizabethan unable to adjust to the changing times. In doing so, he has crafted an impressively tight work of operatic storytelling.
Such invention is par for the course for a director who is acclaimed internationally for productions that are characterised by both their creative imagination and their fidelity to the operatic text. For instance, his 2008 rendering of Strauss’s Salome, for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, manages to shock some modern opera goers in its honest evocation of the Biblical story.
The cast of his Falstaff is universally marvellous, from Alastair Miles and Jamie MacDougall as the disreputable Pistol and the very Scottish Bardolph, to Louise Winter’s busy go-between Mistress Quickly. Phillip Rhodes impresses as the energetically suspicious husband Ford and his deceptive alter-ego, Mr Brook.
Meanwhile, soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn, whose Mimi illuminated Haines’s La bohème, brings a similarly beautiful depth of expression and emotional intelligence to the role of the Windsor wife Alice Ford.
McVicar has expressed his desire, as designer, to make this a “gorgeous” Falstaff. He has incontestably done so. From a Vermeer-esque housemaid to Falstaff’s preposterously ostentatious finery, the design is as precise as it is sumptuous. In the midnight masquerade of the final scene, McVicar takes the figurative handbrake off, delighting his audience with an extraordinary panoply of characters ranging from a fabulous, larger-than-life Queen Elizabeth I, to Cervantes’s Don Quixote and, even, one of the fantastical avian-human creatures from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch
This is, then, a joyous, hilarious and luxurious Falstaff, and one well worthy of its transfer, next month, to the Edinburgh International Festival.
Filmed Donizetti comedy offers audiences an operatic masterclass
L’elisir d’amore, by Scottish Opera
Review by Mark Brown
Catriona Hewitson and Arthur Bruce in L’elisir d’amore. Photo: James Glossop
Even now, as the remarkable vaccination programme reaches an operatic crescendo, the Covid pandemic casts a long shadow over Scotland’s performing arts. Some companies, not least Scottish Opera (which recently began its extensive Pop-Up Opera tour), are offering outdoor productions.
However, with no change in the Scottish Government’s insistence that indoor theatre audiences sit a considerable two metres apart, our playhouses remain shuttered against the plague. Consequently, we continue to see the release of online work in lieu of live and present stage productions.
The latest filmed offering from Scottish Opera (the pandemic-era output of which has been impressive) is this recording of Donizetti’s delightfully silly comic opera L’elisir d’amore (The elixir of love). Like most online versions of stage shows, it is an example of a theatrical company using the internet as a lifeboat, a safe haven for its work until it can return to its natural habitat of live performance.
Filmed at Glasgow’s splendid Theatre Royal (our national opera company’s home on the west coast), director Roxana Haines’s production looks like an enhanced version of an archive film a company might make of a dress rehearsal. The enhancements, including a greater number of well-placed cameras and some sharp editing, give the movie the professional look of a filmed for TV live opera.
There are numerous factors that make it obvious that this is not simply a rehearsal of a live show. For a start, the physically distanced orchestra are on the stage, rather than in the pit.
Meanwhile, the chorus, who stand in the stalls, are placed even further apart, on account of the fact that singing poses a particular risk of aerosol transmission of the virus. The carefully distanced lead performers themselves play on a stage that extends over the orchestra pit.
Inevitably, this recorded, physically distanced work is a shadow of what it would have been had it been created for a live audience. Nevertheless, it is to Haines’s tremendous credit that it manages to be a thoroughly enjoyable two hours.
Donizetti’s opera buffa is a standard comic tale of boy meets girl, girl rejects boy, boy becomes influenced by a classical tale of chivalric romance, boy meets shameless snake oil salesman, boy bets his entire future happiness on a dodgy “love elixir” which is, in fact, home brewed red wine.
It isn’t difficult to see why the piece (which Haines and costume designer Emma Butchart have set as for a Jane Austen novel) is one of the most popular of Donizetti’s theatre works and a staple of the modern opera repertoire. The music has all of the grandeur and the romantic subtlety that we expect of the Italian opera tradition.
The piece also boasts a series of classic buffo characters: the self-styled “capricious” young woman Adina; her naïve, lovelorn admirer Nemorino; the preposterously self-regarding army sergeant Belcore; and the unscrupulous shyster Dulcamara. Haines is a talented, young director, whose outdoor La bohème for Scottish Opera last autumn was a joy.
She draws universally lovely performances from emerging artists Catriona Hewitson (Adina), Shengzhi Ren (Nemorino) and Arthur Bruce (Belcore), and from Elena Garrido Madrona of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s opera school (in the supporting role of Gianetta). It can only help the development of these young singers that they are joined on-stage by the superb, experienced baritone Roland Wood (who we will soon see live, playing the titular lead in Sir David McVicar’s Falstaff) in the role of Dulcamara.
Even on screen, Wood’s wonderfully comic, beautifully sung performance is a palpable operatic masterclass.
L’elisir d’amore is available to watch via YouTube and the Scottish Opera website: scottishopera.org.uk
This review was originally published in the Sunday National on June 20, 2021
Andrew McTaggart shows some role-swapping flexibility in Iolanthe (in an Inverness car park). Photo: Sally Jubb
Performing-arts companies may still be living under a cloud of Covid uncertainty, but Scottish Opera is firing on all cylinders. Its latest filmed opera, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, begins streaming online on Thursday, and its major production of Verdi’s Falstaff premieres in Glasgow on July 3.
Meanwhile, its latest ‘Pop-Up Opera’, consisting of excerpts from works by Gilbert and Sullivan, has just begun an extensive tour. A cast of five performers (two singers, two musicians and a narrator) is taking a repertoire of half-hour truncations of The Mikado, Iolanthe and The Gondoliers to the Isle of Lewis in the north, the town of Hawick in the south, and many points in between. They began in the car park of Eden Court Theatre in Inverness. It used to be said that all the live arts required for success was “bare boards and passion”. All Scottish Opera requires, it seems, is a lorry trailer and performers prepared to brave whatever the notoriously variable Scottish weather throws at them.
Storyteller Allan Dunn, attired as if in 19th-century Japan, provides us with brief and humorous outlines of the narrative of The Mikado, which knit together a healthy selection of songs from this popular Savoy opera. The fine baritone Andrew McTaggart delights with his expressive singing of the famous songs ‘A Wand’ring Minstrel I’ and ‘Behold the Lord High Executioner!’ The fact that, in a trice, he has shifted character from Nanki-Poo, the wayward Mikado’s son, to Ko-Ko, the newly-empowered Lord High Executioner, is entirely in keeping with the production’s deliberately severe economy.
As Dunn rushes the tale along with the aid of beautifully illustrated storyboards, a virtue is made of necessity, as he jokes that the budget provides not for the opera’s famous trio of maids, but only for one. Cellist Andrew Drummond Huggan and guitarist Sasha Savaloni then proceed to perform an accomplished and jaunty instrumental version of the much-loved ‘Three Little Maids from School’.
When she’s not being sidelined by the lack of the requisite number of maids, soprano Stephanie Stanway gives a lovely performance as the put upon Yum-Yum. The highlight of the show, however, is a cleverly updated version of the satirical number ‘I’ve Got a Little List’, which is as topical as a new episode of Have I Got News for You? Gilbert and Sullivan would, one suspects, have approved entirely.
On the opening day, the abbreviated Mikado was partnered with an equally radically reduced Iolanthe. This satirical fairy tale may be less widely known than The Mikado, but it is told by the same means, with Stanway excelling as both the titular miscreant fairy and the much-desired shepherdess Phyllis.
These Pop-Up Operas are tremendously good fun, and a testament to Scottish Opera’s determination to serve communities throughout the country. Their extreme brevity, no doubt, reflects a duty of care to audiences (especially given the vagaries of the Scottish climate). Even so, one fears, that succinctness will still leave many artistic appetites somewhat underfed.
Rhian Lois as Gretel in Scottish Opera’s new online production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel
Two children lost in a dark forest, uncertain of a way out, and at danger from a mysterious force. Considered thus, Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1893 opera based upon the tale of Hansel and Gretel, and complete with hopeful, triumphant ending, makes for a fine metaphor for our collective experience of the Covid crisis.
Without question, there is a distinctly modern dimension to Scottish Opera’s new film of Humperdinck’s magnum opus. Directed by Daisy Evans of Silent Opera fame, this costumed concert performance was recorded in December of last year on the stage of Glasgow’s Theatre Royal.
Evans’s iconoclastic resetting of the opera combines the timelessness of the folk tale with such symbols of modernity as a metal shopping trolley and pizza discount vouchers. When the titular siblings are at play, they do so with figures cut out from a glossy consumer catalogue.
As in the telling of the story by the Brothers Grimm, Hansel and Gretel are put into the forest because their desperate and impoverished mother is unable to feed them. The image could only be more up-to-the-minute if Marcus Rashford arrived suddenly to demand that the children be provided with a nutritious meal.
It isn’t only the kids’ plight that is driven by economics. Evans’s staging, too, is on a modest budget.
With no sets to speak of, the director has placed the orchestra on the stage. The singers perform in front of the musicians, on a temporary stage that has been placed on top of the pit.
The effect, in filmic terms, is surprisingly successful, giving the movie the kind of simple intimacy that one expects of a concert performance. Indeed, Evans seems more than happy for her film to be something of a rough diamond, more of an “as live” recording than a carefully produced piece of cinema.
The fine cast appear to be entirely committed to the director’s ideas. Kitty Whately, who is cross cast as the emphatically boyish Hansel, and Rhian Lois, as Gretel, perform with a delightful, antagonistic energy and a sympathetic innocence.
Soprano Nadine Benjamin puts in a superb double shift, playing both Mother (whose desperation is deepened, in Evans’s version, by pregnancy) and the exuberantly eccentric Witch. Baritone Phillip Rhodes’s Father encapsulates the humour of David Pountney’s English translation of the libretto, in which the paterfamilias is a “drunken sod”.
Rhodes’s arrival home, carrying unexpected groceries in a supermarket branded plastic bag and slurping from a can of lager, is typical of the production’s light-heartedness.
There are moments, however, in which the director’s re-envisioning of the opera stretches one’s credulity. For instance, the famous scene, at the end of Act 2, in which Hansel and Gretel settle down to sleep in the forest is not enhanced by the protective angels arranging a bunch of teddy bears around the slumbering children.
Likewise, the use of a piece of tinsel to denote the magic nature of the Witch’s broomstick and the ludicrously miniaturised representation of the demonic oven. These are, no doubt, knowingly tongue-in-cheek, but no less problematic for that.
Such complaints are but quibbles, however. This is a highly enjoyable film that boasts brilliant playing of Humperdinck’s memorable and lovely music.
The film of Hansel and Gretel premieres online at 6pm on February 10: scottishopera.org.uk
This review was originally published on the website of the Daily Telegraph on February 21, 2021
Scottish Opera hits the high notes with its latest, oven-ready film
Hansel and Gretel, by Scottish Opera
Review by Mark Brown
Rhian Lois as Gretel. Photo: James Glossop
Two siblings find themselves outcast and alone, wandering around helplessly, with no prospect of good counsel from their hapless father. But that’s enough about Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. Let us turn, instead, to something much more edifying, namely, Scottish Opera’s new film based upon German composer Engelbert Humperdinck’s famous opera Hansel and Gretel.
The movie is directed by Daisy Evans, who has received considerable acclaim for her innovative work with London-based company Silent Opera. It records a concert performance that was staged, sans audience, at Glasgow’s splendid Theatre Royal back in December of last year.
From the very outset, when we see Hansel and Gretel (played with gusto by a cross-cast, but emphatically boyish, Kitty Whately and Rhian Lois) mucking about with the accoutrements of modern childhood, we know that we are in the present day. Evans sticks with Humperdinck’s narrative in which the children are put into the forest, not by a wilfully wicked stepmother, but by their desperately impoverished and exasperated mother(a palpably overwrought Nadine Benjamin, whose anxiety is heightened, in this rendering, by pregnancy).
Sent to gather berries, as there is no food in the house, the children’s plight is caused, not by innate evil, but by the kind of poverty that has been illuminated so painfully in our own society by the Covid pandemic. When food does finally arrive, it comes courtesy of a triumphant and inebriated father (Phillip Rhodes on gloriously bullish form), who rolls in, slurping comically from a can of lager.
However, his joyful exuberance is short-lived. Hansel and Gretel are already lost in the deep, dark forest.
In terms of storytelling, Evans’s version of the folktale sits neatly between tradition and modern allegory. In aesthetic terms, her film is similar to movies of live stage performances one might expect to see on a TV channel like BBC Four or Sky Arts.
Recorded to a high quality in both sound and vision, the show never pretends to be anything other than filmed theatre. The Scottish Opera orchestra is always visible, playing Humperdinck’s beautifully harmonic music from the Theatre Royal stage.
For their part, the singers perform in front of the musicians, on a temporary stage that has been built over the orchestra pit. Evans switches perspective back-and-forth between close-ups on the singers and more panoramic views of Theatre Royal stage, complete with its superb, gilded proscenium arch.
Recorded “as live”, the film has a charmingly rough aspect to it. For instance, a prop error towards the end (in which a broomstick becomes ensnared in a shopping trolley and is whirled amusingly around the stage) makes the cut, almost as a testament to the movie’s unedited theatricality.
As a concert performance, this is opera on a limited budget. The director highlights this mischievously in ways that will please or irritate, according to taste.
The broomstick of the cannibalistic witch (played with wonderful idiosyncrasy by the versatile Nadine Benjamin) is rendered magical by simply wrapping some tinsel around it. The witch’s diabolic oven is miniaturised to fit easily in the supermarket trolley filled with confectionery that stands in for the gingerbread house.
There is, unquestionably, oodles of chutzpah in such choices. However, one can’t help but wonder if more impressive, less deliberately parsimonious options might have worked better.
Such complaints border on nitpicking, however, when one considers the overall scheme of the film. Highly original and brilliantly performed, this Hansel and Gretel is a lockdown gift for opera lovers.
Hansel and Gretel is currently streaming at: scottishopera.org.uk
This reviewwas originally published in the Sunday National on February 14, 2021
Elizabeth Llewellyn (Mimi), Rhian Lois (Musetta) and Roland Wood (Marcello) in Scottish Opera’s outdoor production of La bohème. Photo: James Glossop
Scottish Opera could have been forgiven for choosing a jaunty and uplifting work for its first show of the Covid era. Instead, it has, bravely and boldly, opted for Puccini’s painfully relevant 1896 opera La bohème.
The piece, in which the lives of young, impoverished Parisian artists are scarred by tuberculosis, is performed, in director Roxana Haines’s innovative production, in modern dress and in the open air (under a canopy in Scottish Opera’s car park, no less). In the interests of the comfort of the carefully physically distanced, mask-wearing audience, John Dove’s version of Puccini’s score runs to a little over an hour and a half, without an interval.
The libretto, which is in English, is an impressively crisp, occasionally audacious translation by Amanda Holden. It is performed by a fabulous group of warrior singers who face the elements with the courage of a band of medieval troubadours.
The orchestra (the playing of which is amplified by speakers in the outdoor auditorium) are, of course, protected from the elements. They play, out of our view, from inside the Scottish Opera studios, under the baton of Stuart Stratford.
The set is comprised, inauspiciously, of two haulage wagons and a platform covered in what Donald Trump might, with unusual accuracy, call “fake grass”. However, this rough-and-readiness befits the artisanal defiance of the production. Indeed, in the immensely capable hands of designer Anna Orton, the opera’s impecunious Bohemians look like the denizens of Bruce Robinson’s iconic film Withnail and I, if it had been made for our virus-ravaged times.
On the opening evening (every performance begins at 5pm), the Scottish weather, inevitably, transformed the makeshift theatre into something of a wind tunnel at times. All the better, it seemed, for Samuel Sakker’s struggling writer Rodolfo and Elizabeth Llewellyn’s consumptive costume maker Mimì to pursue their tortured love affair, under the shadow of the latter’s advancing illness.
One suspects that the audience would, if operatic etiquette allowed, have been on its feet as Sakker and Llewellyn delivered the two great arias and the magnificent duet with which Puccini ends Act 1. The Australian tenor delivers Rodolfo’s song with a shuddering pathos, while Llewellyn, who made her name playing Mimì for English National Opera 10 years ago, sings with an equally powerful passion.
This opera has always had moments of light relief, but Haines raises these to another level. Rhian Lois, playing the singer Musetta, and Francis Church, as the wealthy Alcindoro, perform their roles with, respectively, an attitude and an absurdity that give the piece an unusually comic dimension.
The cast is excellent to an individual, with Roland Wood outstanding as the painter Marcello. The truncated score itself is delivered with a swirling, undiminished beauty, despite the strange circumstances.
Little wonder, therefore, that by the end of this audacious La bohème, the weather-beaten audience was cheering this production to its temporary rafters.
Until September 13. Further details: scottishopera.org.uk
This review was originally published on the website of the Daily Telegraph on September 6, 2020
John Adams’s Nixon in China is one of the most remarkable operas from the second half of the 20th century. A work, not only of political history but, in its extraordinary third (and final) act, also of existential philosophy, it is opera on an impressively grand scale.
The first opera to be written by the American composer, the piece is based upon US president Richard Nixon’s famous, week-long visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1972 (the first ever by a US head of state). The visit, in which Nixon met with Mao Tse-tung (Chairman of the Communist Party of China) and held substantive talks with China’s premier Chou En-lai, altered the course of Sino-American relations, and also of the Cold War.
In this co-production for Scottish Opera, the Royal Danish Theatre and Teatro Real Madrid, director John Fulljames puts the focus on the visit as history. The events of 1972 are placed within the frame of an archive, where staff explore film footage, photographs, newspaper clippings and magazine articles about Nixon’s trip.
It is a brilliant conceptual innovation, in both dramatic and technical terms. Thanks to Fulljames’s excellent design team (designer Dick Bird, lighting designer Ellen Ruge and projection designer Will Duke) the action unfolds ingeniously from a world of pre-digital technology (such as the arrival of Air Force One in Beijing projected onto a series of stand-alone screens which rotate on a cleverly, and regularly, employed stage revolve).
The versatile stage design opens out to envision a China that the American people hadn’t seen since before the Maoist revolution of 1949. As it does so, the renowned repetition and variation of Adams’s music combines with an operatic heft that defies the definition of the composer as a “minimalist”. The result is a score that has both inherent momentum and an impressive sense of drama.
The opera itself is as much a work of universal theatre as it is a historical piece. Alice Goodman’s libretto sparks with wry humour, not least in its depiction of Nixon’s hawkish national security adviser Henry Kissinger (played with energetic, dark humour by the superb baritone David Stout) as a sadistic pervert.
There are outstanding performances by all of the leads. The glorious South Korean soprano Hye-Youn Lee is as powerful in her (often humorous) portrayal of Madame Mao as she is in her singing of the role.
Julia Sporsén’s Pat Nixon, Mark Le Brocq’s Mao and Nicholas Lester’s Chou En-lai are equally accomplished in their vivid characterisations. The exceptional African-American baritone Eric Greene’s Nixon is a sharp, by turns, earnest and knowingly ironic, portrait of a politician who was, in 1972, both seeking re-election and, very consciously, trying to write his own page in history.
Fulljames’s production (from the fantastic cast to the Scottish Opera orchestra under the baton of Portuguese conductor Joana Carneiro) executes beautifully the opera’s shift in tone in the existential third act. Here memory, unfulfilled political and personal ambitions and the weight of mortality tower above Nixon’s “week that changed history”.
As Lester’s resigned, somewhat melancholic Chou exits the stage one can almost see the hand of history writing the damning epitaphs that both Nixon and Mao were powerless to prevent.
Solène Weinachter in Antigone, Interrupted. Photo: Scottish Dance Theatre
From modern mythology to the Ancient Greek variety, as Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT) tackles Sophocles with the new solo show Antigone, Interrupted. The first choreography for SDT by Catalan dance maker Joan Clevillé (who was appointed artistic director of the company last year), the piece is performed by the superb French dancer Solène Weinachter.
The director has expressed his fascination with the modern resonances of the character of Antigone, the aristocratic Theban who rebelled against King Creon’s decree that the body of her brother Polynices (who had taken up arms against Thebes) be left unburied. However, rather than focus the piece precisely upon Antigone herself, Clevillé has cast Weinachter in an almost impossibly challenging array of roles.
The dancer appears as a conversationally informal version of herself, and also as a narrator and all of the key players in Sophocles’s drama (from Creon to the Chorus itself). Consequently, she finds herself engaged in a great many performative tasks that prevent her from getting to the tragic core of Antigone herself.
The pity of this is that Weinachter is a captivating performer, not least in the too few moments when she physicalises Antigone’s anguish and her terrible, sacrificial compulsion. If only Clevillé had taken the economical route of offering the audience some relatively brief, necessary narration interspersed with Weinachter’s performance of Antigone alone.
The overloading of Weinachter’s performance is all the more frustrating because the piece enjoys fine, minimal design, and a smart, atmospheric (if occasionally overcooked) soundscape.
The obvious comparison is with Ewan Downie’s recent, one-man Achilles for Glasgow-based Company of Wolves, which cut Homeric, poetic prose narration with a concentration upon the central character. It is a comparison that does not serve SDT’s uneven production well.
For tour dates for Antigone, Interrupted, visit: scottishdancetheatre.com
These reviews were originally published in The Herald on Sunday and the Sunday National on February 23, 2020
Scottish Stage 