Spot-on in almost every way: Scottish Opera’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream reviewed

Scottish Opera’s new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to open in midwinter. Snow falls, fairies hurl snowballs and the aurora borealis flickers and arcs across the darkened sky. Meanwhile Britten’s score swoons and sighs, its drowsy clouds of string tone wafting above gently snoring basses to create an atmosphere whose every glimmer evokes perfumed warmth. It should be a contradiction, but it doesn’t feel that way at all. Dominic Hill’s direction, Tom Piper’s designs and Lizzie Powell’s lighting (it’s hard to separate their contributions) create a visual world of opposites, illusions and inverted expectations; a setting for magic and misrule, which last time I checked is pretty much exactly what’s needed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whether Shakespeare’s or Britten’s.

So action that’s supposed to be taking place outdoors actually happens indoors – a haunted glasshouse with tarnished mirrors, and a scuffed parquet floor – and the general aura of fantasy generates its own dream logic. Beds float in mid-air, the fairies are dusty, fuzzy things that could have been swept out from behind a sofa, and Oberon and Tytania (Lawrence Zazzo and Catriona Hewitson) resemble members of the Addams Family. They’re creepy and they’re kooky; again, this is surely exactly what Shakespeare ordered, and what Britten delivered when he composed these roles for a countertenor and a coloratura soprano. Hewitson sang with crystalline brilliance, while Zazzo had a blanched sound to match his ghostly features; just sufficiently off-kilter (in an otherwise sensuous sound world) to register as uncanny.

Britten begins and ends in fairyland – there’s none of that tedious Athenian exposition (a brief wordless opening tableau representing Shakespeare’s preliminaries is one of Hill’s few miscalculations). Enchantment is the default here, and in that context the four human lovers are inevitably destined to be overshadowed, which is a pity because Scottish Opera’s team are a likeable bunch, singing handsomely in ever-grimier pyjamas.