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Music
Benjamin Britten
Adapted by
Benjamin Britten
Conductor
Paul Daniel
Original director
Robert Carsen
Director
Emmanuelle Bastet
Oberon
Robin Blaze
Tytania
Sarah Tynan
Theseus
Iain Paterson
Hippolyta
Leah-Marian Jones
Lysander
Alfred Boe
Demetrius
Leigh Melrose
Hermia
Victoria Simmonds
Helena
Linda Richardson
Bottom
Peter Rose
Quince
Graeme Danby
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Coliseum
23 June - 8 July
2004
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English National Opera has revived Robert Carsen's 1995 production of Britten's magical
Midsummer Night's Dream
in its current summer season for a run of five performances.
The production highlights the sexual tensions of the original play and the opera, emphasising the achievment of physical love as the hard-won outcome of much bickering, jealousy and a variety of other pre-conquest hurdles. The importance of sex is inherent in the play, but the audience is left in no doubt about its primacy in Carsen's production, not least in the magically engineered reconciliation between the lovers Hermia and Lysander and Helena and Demetrius in beds that at first are suspended from the ceiling but which become earthbound so the lovers can find themselves in each others arms beneath the sheets. Not so much the earth move to ecstasy, but the bed came down from above.
Almost incidental to Britten, also Shakespeare, is the umbrella plot of the nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta whose wedding day is celebrated by the mechanicals' play. Their 'happy' union (as we know subsequently to be doomed) is a model for the youngsters' intentions. Shakespeare and Britten, contrast its naturalness and anticipated happy outcome, indeed permanent equilibrium, not only with the up-and-down, rather bitchy, squabbles of the regal fairy couple, Oberon and Tytania and the comically arranged attraction of the latter to the ass-headed Bottom, but also by the 'comic relief' of the mechanicals' enactment of the Romeo-Juliet play of Pyramus and Thisbe, in which the couple far from being reconciled in bed lie dead in a common grave. Typically Shakespeare's late sixteenth-century comedy is saturated with ironies and suggestions of unhappy reality not mirrored in the seemingly 'all end's well' play.
This irony was not lost on Britten who managed to develop different music for each of the various groups. The enchantment of the wood with its permeating glissandi is the world of the immortals, Puck, Oberon, Tytania and all her fairy horde of cobwebs and mustard-seeds. The mechanicals land up in an operatic pastiche like a nineteenth-century pantomime the kind so much beloved by Madame VestrČe and others. Britten's normal style was reserved for the lovers and the brief appearance of Theseus and Hippolyta.
Despite its beauty Britten's adaptation of
Midsummer Night's Dream
is not as easy to pull off as one might expect. Carsen's production and the various roles were only in part successful. Fairly-land was well represented in the gorgeously seductive performance of Sarah Tynan as Tytania. Her scenes with Bottom and her entourage were at times comical and at times magical as they should be. Less happy was Robin Blaze as Oberon. He was neither menacing nor arch enough for the fairy king. His vengeance on his wife for keeping the changeling was not spittingly feline as it should be, nor was his vocal presentation as strong or as characterful as it might be. It sounded a little too like choral evensong (a differentt kind of magical fairy land) to be wholly convincing. I also found Emil Wolk's Puck annoying not least of his deliberate mannerism of mis-spearking Shakespeare's lines. He sent them up again and again with deliberate misapplications of the meter. The effect was less funny than like a school-boy's attempt to ridicule versification in general. Cheap laughs, and a disservice to complex mix in Puck of powerful servant and independent prankster.
The lovers were well performed by Victoria Simmonds, Alfred Boe, Leigh Melrose and Linda Richardson. Their energetic fleeing from each other and their confusion as their lives are taken in hand, ruined by Puck, and 'mended' by Oberon was consistently engaging and avoided the sense in the observing, and for the most part 'been-there-known-that' audience of irritation. Perhaps a good smack, of course non-violent and leaving no mark, would make them grow up.
The mechanicals were well characterised, and seemed to enjoy most of the musical 'breaks' that Britten gives them. Bragging Bottom and his crew romped comically through the first two acts. However, at the crucial moment they failed. The play at the end is also the end of the play, and is intended by Britten to be funny. The trouble is managing the layers of satire and mingling them with sufficient no-layer slapstick. The Donizetti (mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor) take-off with its non-Donizetti flute solo is funny for the cognoscenti but can be too 'in' to come off by itself in the theatre. Likewise is the wonderfully esoteric moment when the human court of Theseus, Hippolyta and the young lovers mock in chaotic polyphony the ordered madrigal of the mechanicals: a musical reversal of what they are saying ‚ a take only possible when arts of music and words are combined. Britten here was chuckling into his sleeve, but of course the joke is mostly lost on an audience without the score since the condemnatory words cannot be heard due to the complexity of their 'disorderly' counterpoint. But this sort of touch shows what Britten was intending, and many productions manage to make the play touching, knowing and comical. This production managed none at this point and so fell rather flat.
Fortunately neither play nor opera end there. Puck has the final word, but as I have indicated, for me this was no conciliation. So despite its insights and excellencies, and the orchestra under Paul Daniels being in fine and sophisticated form the evening that began well in the end misfired.
Roderick Swanston |
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