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| Hänsel (Kamilla Dunstan), Peter (Timothy Connor), Gertrud (Elspeth Marrow), Gretel (Gemma Lois Summerfield) Images: Chris Christodoulou |
Britten Theatre, Royal College
of Music
Peter – Timothy Connor/Nicholas
Morton
Gertrud – Elspeth Marrow/Amy
LyddonHänsel – Kamilla Dunstan/Katie Coventry
Gretel – Gemma Lois Summerfield/Sofia Larsson
Witch – Richard Pinkstone/Joel Williams
Sandman – Maria Stasiak
Dew Fairy – Louise Fuller
Liam Steel (director)
Myriddin Wannel (designs)Andy Purves (lighting)
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| Gertrud (Elspeth Marrow) and Peter (Timothy Connor) |
At the risk of sounding like a
stuck record, albeit with less varied tunes, I shall say again that much of the
best opera in London is to be found at our conservatoires. Moreover, they seem
to get better and better. I am not sure why, but it had been a little while
since I had gone to a Royal College of Music production; this made me realise
just what I had been missing. Indeed, I think it was probably not only the best
production I had seen there, but perhaps, all things considered – and there are
always many things to consider when it comes to opera! – the best production of
Hänsel und Gretel I had seen
anywhere.
Liam Steel’s staging is the one
I and many others have been waiting for, light-years away from the evasive,
glossy, yet reassuringly völkisch - reassuring to the völkisch, that is – School
of Cameron Mackintosh production Adrian Noble recently inflicted upon the
Vienna State Opera. I can hear a self-styled operatic ‘conservative’ seething
already: ‘Oh for goodness sake. Leave it alone; it’s just a fairy tale.’
Indeed, the bizarre Bernd
Weikl has recently called for criminal prosecutions (!) of directors whose
work he does not like, has done just that, pointing to the New York Met (yes, you
read that correctly) as a model of sensible staging and funding. Just a fairy
tale? Fairy tales, as we all, save for a bewildering number of opera directors
and managers, know, are full of all manner of violence. So, of course, are
adult constructions of something called ‘childhood’. Children do not think
about ‘childhood’, claim to wish to ‘protect’ it, whilst at every twist and
turn undermining it; children, simply, or rather not so simply, live their
lives under the increasingly oppressive shadow of this construction. They – and
we – learn a great deal from ‘fairy tales’. We certainly do on this occasion,
in which abuse takes centre stage. That abuse is not so much the abuse of
childhood’s construction, although we are likely also to be led to reflect upon
that, as that violence against children which, more often than not, takes place
within the ‘home’, within the hallowed sanctuary-cum-torture-chamber of the
family.
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| Gretel (Gemma Lois Summerfield) |
I nearly added ‘bourgeois’ to
‘family’, then decided against it, since one of the many disturbing aspects of
Steel’s production is the poverty – very much part of the ‘fairy tale’ and of
the ‘original’ artwork from Engelbert Humperdinck and his sister, Adelheid
Wette – in which the family lives. We begin with a cartoon, a projection of
what two children, plonked in front of the television whilst their parents are
out (perhaps working), are watching: David Ochs’s Who’s Hungry? Ending with the old test card – now that is something
to divide us according to age – we can then focus properly, in every sense,
upon the revealed stage. When we first properly see Peter and Gertrud, they are
dirt – literally, so – poor, their unwashed, unkempt existence mirrored in,
intensified by the miserable kitchen in which they play. Myriddin Wannell’s
designs, here and elsewhere, are as crucial to the development of the Konzept as Steel’s detailed, yet never
too-detailed Personenregie. The
awkwardness of the children’s dancing is as important, in its way, as the
stunted dance of Elektra in Patrice
Chéreau’s shattering staging (ironically, recently taken to the Met). They
are certainly damaged, then, by the abject poverty that reduces them to the
all-too-convenient category of what many, too many, in this country would
dismiss as ‘chavs’, and, as soon becomes clear, by something else, as yet
intangible. And yet, at the same time, they are not quite broken; they can
play, even if, especially in Hänsel’s case, it takes a bit of sisterly
encouragement for him to break his inhibitions. (And what, we might well ask,
lies behind or beneath those inhibitions? It seems a little more than mere
insistence that he is a boy, not a girl, although that is clearly the starting
point, in work and production.)
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| Peter (Nicholas Morton) |
Lest that all sound too
un-Grimm-like (but what do the ‘protectors’ of the Brothers actually know of
their collections?), the woods are wonderfully so. Are they in some sense a
projection, a fantasy? Perhaps. Certainly some of the darkness appears to have
resulted from the cartoon projections. (The second act is introduced by Jan
Švankmajer’s Jabberwocky, the third
by Katy Towell’s Never Wake Up; their
relevance will be clear from the titles alone, but their portrayals of
childhood within a general framework entertainment, not least portrayals of
dolls and their dismemberment, tell us more still.) That this is a nightmare is clear, certain objects, not least the
stove, the fridge, and the kitchen door, remaining constant, or near-constant,
throughout all three acts. That is not, of course, to say that the nightmare is
not also ‘reality’. Gnarled trees, made up sometimes, or so it seems, of
strange woodland figures, enhance the sense not only of danger but of necessary
enchantment (whether good, evil, or something else). The Sandman’s emergence
fascinates: is he ‘just’ a vagrant with carrier bags or something more
primæval, as his pleasing, traditional countenance and, indeed, Andy Purves’s
lighting might suggest? We are not sure, and indeed our dreams and nightmares
play a role in our interpretation.
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| Sandman (Maria Stasiak) |
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| Hansel (Katie Coventry), Peter (Nicholas Morton), Gertrud (Amy Lyddon), and Gretel (Sofia Larsson) |
The Evening Prayer underlines
how close, through necessity, Hänsel and Gretel have become: now he does not
mock her prayer, as he had at the beginning of the first act; they protect each
other. And the Dream Pantomime is, quite simply heartbreaking. Here, we see the
‘perfect’ family, the ‘perfect’ Christmas they – we – desperately want. Not
only are the children the objects of that unconditional parental love society
has children, rightly or wrongly, believe is the norm; not only do they receive
gifts which are worth more, emotionally as much as financially, than they have
likely ever received in their lives; not only are their parents bedecked in
good, respectable middle-class clothes (slightly different, according to which
cast) which they could never afford and would most likely shun even if they
could; not only is a veritable feast of food and wine prepared; there is hope,
and there is fulfilment of that hope. It is, in short, Christmas – or rather,
our construction of ‘Christmas’, which necessarily involves, co-opts, arguably
abuses children. The appearance of the Dew Fairy, at the beginning of the next
act, offers deconstructive humour; where that ideal might have granted us
forlorn hope, here we have someone much the worse for wear, spilling her wine
from the bottle – not so much the morning after the night before as her revels
not yet having ended.
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| Witch (Joel Williams) and Hänsel (Katie Coventry) |
An abiding childhood fear at my
school, and I am sure not just at my school, was of the loner who would attract
one back to his – it always seemed to be ‘his’ – car with a bag of sweets. We
heard about that all the time, although no one ever seemed to have heard of it
actually happening. The Witch attracts the children then, with conventional
methods – just as (s)he always has. We see the gingerbread house as we should.
And we see a ‘respectable’ if somewhat grotesque old lady (en travestie), her house boasting comfortable furnishings as well
as edible treats, and, crucially, photographic portraits of young children,
just as we would when they were reported missing – and indeed, just as we have
at the beginning of the show. The children are wary, perhaps warier than usual
in productions of this work; do they know something already, perhaps have some
experience of what might happen? At any rate, the conservative’s ‘harmless’
fairy tale progresses as it should, the Witch capturing Hänsel in her cage,
force-feeding him like a dog, ready for his baking, until the children turn the
tables. There is a break in which we are blinded – well, not quite, but we
certainly cannot see what happens behind. A few words of dialogue – the first
act also began with some – lead us into the children’s tentative healing of the
rescued other children. There is joy, but there is clearly also trauma; how
could there not be? And when, full of the (apparently, at least) purest joy,
their father finally discovers them, ‘true’ familial love seems to be the order
of the day. Given the horrors of what have happened, this reunion is rendered
all the more moving – perhaps more so on the first evening than the second,
which seemed a little less dark (although that might have been more a matter of
my own mood, or that of a section of the audience, which seemed determined,
bizarrely, to laugh a little too often on the second evening).
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| Witch (Richard Pinkstone) |
And yet… Steel has a chilling
twist to the tale. Gretel scowls at the children; they look at her, terrified. There
is no heartfelt reunion, indeed no physical contact, there. The inebriated,
genuinely beloved Peter, oblivious to all but the general rejoicing, fails to
notice as she collects her (the Witch’s) wig and stick. There may be no use
crying over spilt milk; how, however, could the children – and we – fail to do
so in this case? And ‘case’ perhaps should have more than one meaning, for who
is the narrator, reliable or unreliable, here? What actually was or is the ‘abuse’?
Is it ‘real’ or the fantasy of Hänsel and Gretel, as a result of neglect and
ill-temper on their mother’s part? When Gertrud collects the stick, is there
just a chance she might actually be the long-suffering mother (perhaps another
of our longstanding constructions: the ‘wicked stepmother’) having yet again to
clean up the mess? But surely that fear on the children’s faces was all-too-real,
was it not? Difficult questions indeed.
None of that would have
amounted to anything very much without such excellent performances. So enthused
was I by the first performance I attended that I arranged to return the
following evening to hear the second cast. Our Hänsels and Gretels were not
dissimilar. Both Kamilla Dunstan and Katie Coventry were excellent at
portraying their character’s boyishness, without loss to genuinely lovely
mezzo-soprano tone quality. (It goes with the mezzo territory, I suppose.) As
Gretel, Gemma Lois Summerfield and Sofia Larsson both proved warmly
sympathetic, both in vocal and stage terms. Elspeth Marrow and Amy Lyddon both
carried off the difficult task of portraying, indeed exploring a more complex
Gertrud than we genuinely encounter. Not only did they disturb, though; they
both sang beautifully. (I am once again proud to say how lovely it is to
encounter former Royal Holloway students, in this case Marrow and Coventry,
making their way in musical careers.) There was greater contrast between the
two Peters. Timothy Connor was fuller of swagger, disarmingly sexy; Gertrud’s
mother would doubtless have thought him a bad lot, yet been charmed in person.
Nicholas Morton offered a sadder, more forlorn figure, not least in vocal tone,
very much emerging from the German Romantic past. Both worked splendidly;
indeed, they complemented each other strikingly, offering different
perspectives, even within the same production. Our two witches, Richard
Pinkstone and Joel Williams, both trod with great skill the fine line between
comedy and tragedy, with stagecraft second to none, stagecraft that yet did not
eclipse their estimable vocal attributes. Maria Stasiak and Louise Fuller
offered lovely singing and plenty of stage presence as the Sandman and Dew
Fairy respectively. The RCM Chorus of Echoes and the younger Angels and
Gingerbread Children rounded off a thoroughly excellent cast; their
contribution may be mentioned last here, but it should certainly not be
considered as least.
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| Dew Fairy (Louise Fuller) |
Michael Rosewell’s conducting
and the playing of the RCM Opera Orchestra were similarly first-class. It might
seem absurd to compare them to Thielemann at the Vienna State Opera last
November, in the Noble production I mentioned above, and I do not really intend
to do so, but hand on heart, I can say that they would have nothing to fear
from such a comparison. The theatre is smaller, of course, but what we heard
was plenty to fill the RCM’s Britten Theatre, and not just to fill it, to sound
as gloriously Romantic, and if anything, more variegated, both in terms of
texture and articulation, than that Viennese performance. A relatively small
string section (7.6.4.4.2) certainly did not sound small – perhaps occasionally
on the thin side on the second night, but only occasionally (and that may have
been more a matter of sitting in a different part of the theatre). There were
some truly ravishing solos to be enjoyed. The wind sounded vernal, autumnal,
and all manner of seasonal shades in between. Rosewell’s handling of
Humperdinck’s post-Wagnerian melos
was impeccable, indeed often enthralling. Transitions were handled without the
slightest hint of awkwardness. Humperdinck’s Wagnerisms and, I think, his
anticipations of Strauss (Rosenkavalier,
for instance, in both the second and third acts) too shone through in all their irresistible loveliness. Not for
nothing did Strauss conduct the premiere. Equally apparent and immediate,
however, was the dramatic menace necessary to convey the story and its
undertones, often founded in a secure yet wandering bass line; this was no tale
of opposition between pit and stage. All concerned had, quite clearly, learned
from the collaboration – and, I suspect, enjoyed it very much too. I certainly
did, and, as you will have gathered, it really had me think too. These, then,
were performances for which I should gladly have travelled some way to see and
to hear. Outstanding!
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| Gretel (Sofia Larsson) and Hänsel (Katie Coventry) |
