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Friday 9 January 2009

Great Britten

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Opera North, Manchester

Powder Her Face
Royal Opera, Linbury

One, it has seemed to me, that failed that test is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but thanks to the miraculous production of Opera North I have happily revised my opinion of that too. Seen in the least auspicious setting — what else could you call the Lowry, Salford Quays, the centre of an urban jungle masquerading as a well-planned landscape garden? — it demonstrated various things. One was that the maximum effect can be gained with the minimum means, so long as the people working on it are geniuses of imagination. This Dream has nothing more than strips of translucent material hanging from the flies, and large transparent tethered balloons moving undistractingly around the upper part of the stage; and the most wonderful, subtle, exquisite and rarely obtrusive lighting, designed by the justly named Bruno Poet. It doesn’t suggest a forest, in fact is wholly abstract, but that only enhances its power. The conductor Stuart Stratford coaxes all the sylvan-sleep sounds required from the superlative orchestra, but his main interest is in expression rather than atmosphere, and he conjures a near-Bergian intensity from his players, which is surely right (though the composer himself didn’t, and perhaps didn’t want that). He establishes immediately that the quartet of lovers is in serious trouble, that this is as near to being a midsummer night’s nightmare as a delightful diversion. Martin Duncan the director is fully complicit: the tiresome pair, Helena in particular, is presented in as sympathetic a light as can be; and the forces that propel their often ridiculous behaviour are never lacking in sinister intent. Puck, especially (I saw Tom Walker in Manchester, I think), is just the servant his master needs, or deserves. And Oberon, whom one can only look at briefly because his armour is so eye-bruising, has in James Laing the countertenor voice one dreads to hear, yet in this work it is precisely and nastily right.

More articles from: Michael Tanner | this section

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