Britten – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Opera North

Saturday 12 October 2024

Grand Theatre, Leeds

****

A joyful production, set in the swinging sixties, with dark undertones

Last Saturday was the opening night of Opera North’s revival production of Benjamin Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a reduced version of Shakespeare’s play which he wrote in 1595 or 1596. As Britten wrote in The Observer in June 1960, he didn’t feel, ‘in the least guilty at having cut the play in half. The original Shakespeare will survive.’

Britten and his partner Peter Pears cut the opening of Shakespeare’s play, set in the palace of the Duke of Athens, and began their version later when the characters have entered a wood. This meant it was much easier for the opera to be set in another time period.

“I haven’t tried to give the opera an Elizabethan flavour. It is no more Elizabethan than Shakespeare’s play was Athenian.”

Benjamin Britten, The Observer, 5 June 1960

Martin Duncan’s production, revived for 2024 by Matthew Eberhardt, was set in the 1960s, the decade when Britten’s opera was premiered. Duncan’s production celebrates the 1960s as an age of free love, flower power and psychedelic drugs. The four Lovers wore 60s flower power clothes, with flowery designs and vividly coloured, Mary Quant-style tights for the women. The costumes worn by Oberon and Tytania were made of metallic silver, recalling the metal dresses designed by Paco Rabanne and others in the 60s.

The set was made of Perspex panels that could be raised and lowered to form parts of the forest, and in the final act the walls of a chamber inside the Duke’s palace. Although Perspex, a trade name of Polymethyl methacrylate, was developed in the early 1930s it is particularly associated with the 1960s when it was widely used in fashion, architecture, art, and design. There were also huge plastic bubbles which hover over the set. Jessica Fitton, in her programme note, says the opera, ‘deals with mind-bending substances’ and it was easy to imagine the bubbles as the product of a lysergic trip or its aftermath. Fitton also suggests that Britten’s music has a psychedelic hue:

The score, written in 1960, is magical and strange from the off – it opens with psychedelic glissandi… and the trip goes on.

Jessica Fitton

The fairies were dressed all in white, with black wings. They all wore white wigs, like the children in the film Village of the Damned, a British horror film released in 1960, the year the opera was premiered.

The film is based on the novel The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) by John Wyndham, in which the children develop the ability to read minds and manipulate adults. The fairies are always played by children in the opera, but they aren’t always presented as innocents. Britten wrote in The Observer, ‘I have always been struck by a kind of sharpness in Shakespeare’s fairies.’ At the start and end of this production they put their hands up against the translucent Perspex curtain, like zombies. They were perfectly drilled, always following each other around the stage together in groups, just like the children in the film. Britten’s writing for children is always excellent (on a personal note, I remember singing Britten’s Jubilate Deo – written in 1961 – when I was in my father’s church choir at age 6, and being spellbound by it). The children on Saturday sang superbly.

There was an edge to Puck, played with enthusiastic physicality by Daniel Abelson. Britten envisaged him as a tumbling acrobat, but in this production there was a darker edge to the character. He often crawled around like a feral beast and his legs were covered in large black hairs like an animal. There was something of the noble savage about him, a wild innocence that would have appealed to Britten.

There was an added undertone in the depiction of the Lovers. Philip Brett wrote that Britten sets the opera in,

“a completely private world, a world of possibilities rather than limitations. The folk festival or May games aspect of Shakespeare’s play, then, has been matched by the contemporary notion of misrule, the world of the libido.”

There was a sexual undercurrent when all four of the Lovers stripped down to their underwear, and a similar frisson when Bottom, transformed to a donkey, was wooed by Tytania. Bottom attempted to resist her charms and at one point tried to cover up her bare legs, to laughter from the audience. Her untamed hair and loose undergarments whilst under the influence of the love potion contrasted with her image as the stately Fairy Queen in other parts of the opera. And Puck, dressed only in a splendid pair of red silk pants was not averse to shaking or slapping his own bottom, again to the amusement of the audience.

There was more humour from Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals, or the rustics as Britten called them, the manual workers who staged the play within the play in Act III. Shakespeare provided the comic scenario, Britten brought a witty pastiche of the worst excesses of Grand Opera, and the excellent cast interpreted both with uproarious comedy. Particular comic highlights came from: Henry Waddington as Bottom/Pyramus, outstanding throughout the opera, with a lovely rich voice and a compelling stage presence; and Nicholas Watts as Flute, whose ballet dancing in the female role of Thisby was hilarious.

It was fascinating to compare this production with the semi-staged version of the opera at the Proms by Garsington Opera and the Philharmonia Orchestra a month before. The most striking difference was the role of Oberon, played in Leeds by James Laing. He played the character in the more imperious style of James Bowman in Peter Hall’s Glyndebourne production, rather than the more troubled, argumentative character played by Iestyn Davies in the Garsington version. Laing’s robust counter tenor was somewhere between the richness of Bowman’s voice and the elegance of Davies’ voice.

The four Lovers made an excellent ensemble, Camilla Harris and James Newby reprising their roles from the Garsington performance. Peter Kirk, as Lysander, had an expressive high tenor voice and was perfectly cast as an ardent young lover. James Newby, with a richer and deeper voice, made a convincing Demetrius, cruel in his treatment of Helena early in the opera. Siân Griffiths as Hermia excelled in the scene in Act II with a sweet-voiced Camilla Harris as Helena (above) when they insulted each other about the difference in their heights,

Hermia: “How low am I, you painted maypole?”

Helena: “…Though she be but little, she is fierce.”

Having put their clothes back on, the four made a sophisticated and elegant quartet in Act III.

In his programme note, Jonathan Keates quotes Michael Kennedy’s description of Britten’s score as, ‘lit by an inner enchantment which seeps through the score like a potion.’ This relates to the love potion of the plot, described by Gavin Plumley in his programme note as ‘love juice’, or a ‘recreational and unpredictable sedative’, bringing us back to the 1960s theme. The playing of the Orchestra of Opera North under Garry Walker was intoxicating and vividly characterised, drawing out the subtle way in which Britten orchestrates the various groups of characters in the opera.

This was a joyfully comic production, superbly acted and sung, with some dark undertones that no doubt Britten himself would have appreciated.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be performed on 19, 24 and 31 October at Leeds Grand Theatre, 6 November at Newcastle Theatre Royal, 13 November at The Lowry, Salford, and 20 November at Nottingham Theatre Royal 

Performers

James Laing Oberon King of the Fairies
Daisy Brown Tytania Queen of the Fairies
Camilla Harris Helena
Siân Griffiths Hermia
Peter Kirk Lysander
James Newby Demetrius
Andri Björn Róbertsson Theseus Duke of Athens
Molly Barker Hippolyta Queen of the Amazons
Henry Waddington Nick Bottom a weaver/Pyramus
Dean Robinson Peter Quince a carpenter
Nicholas Watts Francis Flute a bellows-mender/Thisby
Frazer Scott Snug a joiner/Lion
Colin Judson Tom Snout a tinker/Wall
Nicholas Butterfield Robin Starveling a tailor/Moon
Daniel Abelson Puck, aka Robin Goodfellow
Kitty Moore Peaseblossom a fairy
Dougie Sadgrove Moth a fairy
Lucy Eatock Mustardseed a fairy
Jessie Thomas Cobweb a fairy
Fairies Willow Bell, Reggie Blood,
Sienna Christou, Hope Day,
Bethany Doy, Toby Dray,
Olivia Dunning, Lucy Eatock,
Joseph Hall, Nell Hargreaves,
Aurora Harris, Lars Hunter,
Evie Marsden, Felicity Moore,
Kitty Moore, Dougie Sadgrove,
Lyra Schofield, Jessie Thomas

Orchestra of Opera North
Garry Walker Conductor
Martin Duncan Director
Matthew Eberhardt Revival Director
Johan Engels Set Designer
Ashley Martin-Davis Costume Designer
Bruno Poet Lighting Designer
Ben Wright Choreographer
Richard Moore Revival Lighting

Sources

Fitton, Jessica, A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a Nutshell (Opera North programme book October 2024)
Plumley, Gavin, if You Go Down to the Woods Today (Ibid.)
Keates, Jonathan, Midsummer Moonlight (Ibid.)
Benjamin Britten A New Britten Opera (The Observer, 5 June 1960), reproduced in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Overture Opera Guides in Association with the English National Opera (Alma Books 2011)
Brett , Philip, Britten’s Dream: An Introduction (Ibid.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Pinterest)
Benjamin Britten: A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Glyndebourne Festival Opera [1981] (NVC Arts DVD 2001)