SCOTTISH Opera's latest Hansel and Gretel takes a refreshingly retro approach to Humperdinck's opera, sidestepping the supermarkets, shabby housing estates and little kitchens of horrors favoured elsewhere in recent years.
It's something a reviewer now needs to state immediately, whenever a new production hits the stage. Is it family entertainment or just another director's ego trip?
This one passes the test, even if the audience on the opening night seemed a bit subdued.
Though Bill Bankes-Jones's production does not lack ideas, they seldom get in the way of the story. If his new English translation, with all its half-rhymes, is sometimes rather a trial, it has the virtue of clarity – are the surtitles wholly necessary?
From a seat in the front stalls, where Scottish Opera liked to place critics in the old days, the words were seldom drowned by Humperdinck's orchestration, and the acoustics sounded conspicuously warmer than upstairs.
Yet the Wagnerism, or what we would now call the Mahlerism, of the opera is not shirked. Perhaps Emmanuel Joel-Hornak, the able young French conductor, does not go quite so far as to make it seem like Die Walkure for children, as Scottish Opera so memorably did in 1978. But Tim Meacock's decor, with its huge tree trunks built like classical pillars, looks very Bayreuth, reminding us that Humperdinck assisted Wagner on Parsifal.
With Ailish Tynan's pert little Gretel and Kai Ruutel's strapping Estonian Hansel, the title roles are in acceptable hands, and Leah-Marian Jones's glamorous witch, Shuna Scott Sendall's Wagnerian mother and Paul Carey Jones's jaunty father all add to the modest assets of the evening.
HHH
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