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Undiluted pleasure

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 23rd July 2008

Hansel und Gretel
Glyndebourne

La bohème
Royal Opera House

Act I takes place in the most vengefully affordable housing that we haven’t yet had inflicted on us, ecologically friendly too, with scraps of cardboard and nothing in sight that hasn’t been recycled into near-unrecognisability. The two children are wholly convincing, perhaps slightly older than one expects, but more plausible as well. Jennifer Holloway manages to act boyishly, rarest of arts, and there’s nothing winsome about Adriana Kučherová’s Gretel. My only complaint is the enunciation — the opera is sung in German, but I could rarely catch a word; the surtitles rhyme, and are approximate in meaning, but that hardly matters. Mother is played very straight, out of a black-and-white 1950s British movie about northern grimness; one feels for her in her inability to feed the family, and her sending the children off to the forest is nothing more than peevishness, and certainly no indication that she represents the ‘Bad Mother’ of some psychoanalysts.

Act II takes place in a forest, but one of dead trees. The effect is chilling and initially puzzling. It doesn’t do anything to lessen the impact of the score’s most enchanting music, and the last ten minutes of Act II created an atmosphere which one hardly ever gets in an opera house, of the whole audience holding its breath, as the roguish, stylish Sandman of Malin Christensson sauntered into view down a fallen tree-trunk and delivered her message of sleep.

Act III — how I wanted it straightaway, instead of after the enforced picnic — showed why the forest was so stark: the children, given a chance, immediately become rabid hyper-consumers, the Witch’s house a laden supermarket. Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke is by far the most hilarious Witch I have seen, to my amazement I found myself guffawing. But in his tight-fitting pink outfit he is also alarming, and his act as the perfect check-out girl, with goods whizzing along to be put into recyclable bags, evoked a whole disturbing world in which various kinds of danger and nonsense come together. The redeemed children, at the end, are a morbidly obese collection, all victims of their unimpeded greed. This introduction by Pelly of a surprising and satirical element is the masterstroke of this evening of undiluted pleasure.