The stage on which Netia Jones’s production of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream unfolds boasts a giant circular screen, an astrolabe, two telescopes, a grand piano at a crazy angle, and a psychoanalyst’s consulting couch. We know it’s going to be about exploration, but not of the cosmos – this will be an exploration of the mysteries of the human heart.
The bosky setting of Garsington Opera’s open-air theatre is a perfect fit for Jones’s engaging concept. “The forest is the place where anything can happen, where all hierarchies are ended,” she writes in the programme. “Everyone gets lost in the wood: the only ones who know their way around are the fairies.” She is intent on demonstrating that her drama will be both enchanting and full of menace, as suggested by the black-clad figures emerging from the bowels of the earth, and the groaning glissandi emanating from the pit.
King Oberon will make an ass of his beautiful wife Tytania, and his mischief-making spells will wreak havoc in the lives of two unsuspecting young couples by inducing each of the men to become obsessed with the wrong girl; light relief will come through visits to the world of the simple-minded rustic “mechanicals”.
The production is witty and strewn with so many symbols and motifs that it’s inevitable that some don’t quite work: the images on the screen are impenetrable; why is one of the mechanicals got up like Frankenstein’s monster; and why does Oberon don a bull’s head before working his spells? But by and large we’re transported into a wacky but charming alternative reality.
The four lovers scrap and make it up so convincingly that one feels one knows them, so gongs to Caspar Singh, Stephanie Wake-Edwards, James Newby, and Camilla Harris. Gongs should go, too, to each of the mechanicals, most notably to John Savournin as Quince and Richard Burkhard whose Bottom is both commanding and gracefully sung. Jerone Marsh-Reid’s Puck is the most nimble I have ever seen, first making his appearance coming down head-first from his hiding place in a tree, and then slithering into cracks in the ground as though he hasn’t a bone in his body. Jones’s direction of all these characters is brilliantly assured.
And if she had trump cards in countertenor Iestyn Davies as Oberon, and soprano Lucy Crowe as Tytania, she plays them beautifully. Davies’ light but intensely focused sound seems to control everything, while Crowe’s voice rings out majestically, her deluded love-making with Bottom’s donkey being both comic and piercingly sad; the royal pair’s closing duet is exquisite.
But the biggest gong goes to conductor Douglas Boyd, plus the Philharmonia Orchestra, and the grittily authentic voices of the Garsington Opera Youth Company. The orchestral playing is wonderful in its delicate and immaculate perfection.
To 19 July (garsingtonopera.org)