Music
Engelbert
Humperdinck
Conductor
Alexander
Polianichko
Director
Richard Jones
Revival Director
Annilese
Miskimmon
Designer
John Macfarlane
Lighting Designer
Jennifer Tipton
Hansel
Imelda Drumm
Gretel
Linda Kitchen
Mother
Anne-Marie Owens
Father
David Kempster
Witch
Peter Hoare
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Hansel and Gretel
Welsh National Opera
Sadler's Wells
11 March 2004
This revival of Richard Jones 1999 production is a gory tour through three fabulous kitchen scenes, almost humorous and magical enough to disguise the bland score of Humperdinck's first opera. From the outset Imelda Drumm (singing with beautiful clarity and force) and Linda Kitchen convincingly inhabit their sibling relationship combining fighting and affection, against a wonderfully monochrome backdrop of domestic depression. The kitchen sink setting is the grey home for an obese pill-popping mother and drunken father whose children trill over the drama of spilt milk and other terrifying mundanities.
Grey gives way to the oozing red of spilt berries and blood, and starving deprivation gives way to sickening gluttony, in the surreal dream sequence in which Pillsbury doughboys serve the sleeping children a banquet in the woods, accompanied by Jones signature puppetry. Act 3 is a gastronomic version of Shockheaded Peter enacted in the nightmarish kitchen of the witch, a cannibal sung powerfully by Peter Hoare in pantomime baggy tights and granny shoes who forces Gretel to force-feed her brother through a funnel and wraps him up like a chicken leg before meeting an appropriately sticky end.
Although in the end this imaginative staging could not compensate for the uninteresting music played rather half-heartedly by the WNO orchestra, all parts (in particular Imelda Drumm) sang the libretto beautifully, stuffed with such challenging lines as "come now Gretel dear, youll fit the fish kettle here".
Maya Lester
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