Humperdinck’s opera has been given a wide range of treatment in recent years, from the mythic to the highly contemporary. It is a great strength of Olivia Fuchs’ approach that she trusts the narrative itself but is aware of its fairy-tale origins. Niki Turner’s set places the action on a giant story book, with pop up houses, sinister figures and black suited angels, all within a skeletal beech wood. Yet within this setting the characters are convincingly naturalistic. The parents are dysfunctional; there is nothing comic about the father’s drunkenness or the mother’s suicidal tendencies. Only nature can be trusted, the animals in the forest becoming benign and supportive to the lost children.
If this sounds as though the approach was over-serious it was anything but, with a great deal of real humour, though never at the expense of individual characters.
At the heart of the interpretation are Hansel and Gretel themselves. Anna Devin’s Gretel is superb, a convincingly young girl in her gaucheness and naivety, but with a voice to charm and an openness of heart which was captivating. It is she – more than Claudia Huckle’s tom-boyish Hansel – who wins the day. William Dazeley’s Father is dangerously inept. On a good day, having sold his brooms, all is well but one could easily imagine how dysfunctional he would become if even more drunk than he was on this occasion. It was telling that he had not sobered up even when his children have overcome the evil in the forest. A fine characterisation and a good foil to Yvonne Howard’s equally weak and dysfunctional mother. By comparison Susan Bickley’s witch is all sweetness and light; a vision in pink to go with her sweeties. That the children take to her after the rigours of home life is credible; that Gretel is rapidly aware of the danger even more so given her up-bringing. In this case nature is far more important than nurture.
Martin Andre’s orchestra sounded slightly thinner, more muscular than usual in the first half but seemed more robust and romantic in the second. The children’s chorus was delightful and utterly convincing.
On the night we visited, the performance was being relayed live to Scarborough, and we had an introduction by Sir Terry Wogan live from the stage. Unfortunately, after two nights of glorious weather it was raining heavily – but such are the delights of English Summer Opera. BH