Ariadne’s thread

‘They’ve dined well, they’ve drunk their fill, their brains are dull and slow. They’ll sit snoozing in the dark until they hear some applause, and then, out of courtesy, they’ll wake up’. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s words, not mine. I’ve never bought the notion that Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier somehow predicts the first world war. But what’s screamingly obvious is that their next collaboration, Ariadne auf Naxos, precisely skewers the non-existent (in 1916) world of English country-house opera. A millionaire patron has hired an opera company and a comedy troupe for an evening of champagne-fuelled hospitality, and he wants them both finished in time for the fireworks. Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s big idea is to collide the two artistic worlds, live on stage, and see which wins.

It’s a meta-opera, in other words, and it’s a rare staging that — in the backstage Prologue, at least — can resist updating the action to the present. Opera Holland Park’s Ariadne is a co-production with Scottish Opera and it’s arrived in Notting Hill with cast and concept almost unchanged. In Glasgow, the set was dominated by a Jacobean façade which (it’s now obvious) was Holland House, the backdrop for all of OHP’s productions. Yet the Scottish jokes remain, from the kilt-wearing, arse-flashing comedian to — gloriously — the presence of Eleanor Bron, magisterial in designer wellies as the Major Domo. They’ve kept the same conductor — Brad Cohen, finding an even more persuasive blend of wit and grandeur — and retained director Antony McDonald’s conceit of making the trouser-role of the Composer (Julia Sporsén) into a nervy bluestocking, whose encounter with the burlesque queen Zerbinetta (Jennifer France) becomes a moment of sensual awakening. Sporsén’s Composer seemed less brittle and more feisty than in Glasgow, but no less touching for it.

In the pocket-sized opera house at Longborough, meanwhile, they hardly needed to point out the parallels — not when the company’s irrepressible owner Martin Graham proved as willing as ever to saunter on stage for a pre-show pep talk.