A Midsummer Night's Dream, Grand Theatre, Leeds
Tuesday, 13 May 2008
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Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream follows Macbeth as the second of three Shakespeare-based productions that Opera North is presenting this spring. The idea is that each will be staged on a basic set designed by Johan Engels, but it seems that only the floor is common to the first two.
This Dream is played out within a forest of opaque cylindrical shafts, over which hover large balloons. It doesn't sound magical – more like Ikea's latest shower enclosures. Yet, appealing to the imagination rather than to reason, it does work, thanks largely to Ashley Martin-Davis's exquisite costumes and Bruno Poet's lustrous lighting.
In Martin Duncan's simple production, the curtain goes up on a scrim behind which fairies caper: golden-haired, angelic-voiced, androgynous cherubs, dressed in white with black wings. If there's a more magical opening to any opera, I don't know of it. String glissandos, mysterious harmonies and sonorities curling out of the pit suggest the fitful breathing of a sleeper, and shift us imperceptibly between the human world of Athens and the chromatic dream-world of the woods. Stuart Stratford shapes the music subtly and sensitively; Tom Walker's Puck, with more than a hint of Caliban in his hairy legs and his wildness, is exactly how Britten envisaged him: "amoral but innocent". He's under the control of James Laing's coolly ethereal Oberon, who can apply more than a touch of steel to his counter-tenor voice. Jeni Bern's Tytania sprinkles vocal glitter, and is especially appealing in her "Hail, mortal, hail".
Peter Wedd as Lysander and Mark Stone as Demetrius are well matched by the vivacity and charm, respectively, of Frances Bourne's Hermia and Elizabeth Atherton's Helena. Henry Waddington makes a sonorous, well-rounded Bottom.
Dramatically engaging and musically rewarding, this Dream succeeds in marrying the work's fantastical exuberance with its disturbing undercurrents and elements of farce, and is well served by the refined tone and translucent quality of the orchestra.
To 24 May (0870 121 4901), then touring to 21 June (www.operanorth.co.uk)
