Fairy-tale return to opera

Tinkler, whose new production of Engelbert Humper-dinck's fairy-tale opera, Hansel and Gretel, opens at the Theatre Royal on Friday, has visited Scottish Opera before; but in a different guise. For a brief time in the eighties, 35-year-old Tinkler was on the horizon as one of the day's most promising voices.

Canadian-born and raised in England, Tinkler had begun his career early, like many well-known operatic voices, as a treble in the choir of St John's College, Cambridge, where his peers included the brilliant singer, Simon Keenleyside.

Things continued looking good as he studied music at the Royal Northern College of Music and did a degree at Manchester University, alongside such luminaries as conductor Sian Edwards. Advanced studies followed in Berlin and Florence.

``Then I had a short but illustrious singing career,'' said Tinkler. He was seen in Scotland singing the title role in Graham Vick's production of Britten's Billy Budd for Scottish Opera, and the role of Morales in Vick's sensational production of Carmen (the one with the revolving stage) and the part of Maximilian in Bernstein's celebrated Candide from the late eighties.

Then disaster struck. ``At 28 I lost my voice,'' said Tinkler candidly. ``I don't know to this day what happened. The rot had already set in by the time I came up here to do Billy Budd. Some said it was because I started too young. One doctor explained it as a `spastic soft palate' - whatever that is.''

What Tinkler cannot pin down is whether it was physical or psychological, whether it was a crisis of confidence or nerves. ``There's probably an element of all of these,'' he said. ``You just never know, because when you're on a downward spiral everything conspires to make it worse.''

He took a year off to try and get the voice fixed. It didn't work out and he began to wind down his short-lived singing career.

But as he was losing one voice, he was beginning to find another. He was drawn to directing, initially in a smallish way as he assisted other directors at Scottish Opera, Opera North, and at Covent Garden. Last season he worked with students of the RSAMD on the production of Delibes's frothy confection, Le Roi l'a dit, and returned to Scottish Opera where he produced Offenbach's The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein for Opera-go-Round, the small-scale touring arm of the company.

The production of Hansel and Gretel marks his directorial debut with a main house opera production, and he describes the experience as ``very, very strange''. As a singer, Tinkler says he was an instinctive performer.

``The greatest challenge as a director has been to slow down that instinct and rationalise it, and get other people to share it.''

The very first thing he wants to do with the new production is quash rumours that are circulating that it is unsuitable for children under 10. ``There are kids in the opera itself, who have obviously seen it, and they have absolutely no problem with it,'' he said

``There's a very straightforward story in there, and we haven't interfered with that.'' (Certainly, the glimpse I had of the set for Act Two of the opera, while darkly coloured, and emananating an atmosphere of mystery and danger, looked ripe for a fairy tale setting, but distinctly unscary by the standard of lurid images that kids are immune to these days.)

That said, Tinkler also wants to point out that there are as many layers in the traditional story as people want to see. ``The opera is a thematic kaleidoscope, a bubbling, seething cauldron of layers.''

The colours and visual definition in the production, and in Richard Aylwin's design concept - which Tinkler describes as ``incredibly exquisite, textured and beautiful, with shades of light, and symbols that come and go'' - are influenced by the symbolist painters, and especially by Odalin Redon.

For the plot itself, Tinkler adheres strictly to the view that Hansel and Gretel is ``a rites of passage tale'' about the characters of the title. ``It's set in a wood, and, in a fairy tale, the wood is always a place of journey - you go into the deep, dark, unknown and come out having learned something.''

He holds, too, what he claims is the view of the composer in writing the opera: ``Children are sacred; they have redemptive qualities and their experience also redeems others - the gingerbread men.''

One thing he has done is make the children older. He sees them as in their early teens: ``Humperdinck has added a series of potent symbols to the Grimm fairy tale: these children seem too wise for seven-year-olds; their music is certainly too wise for seven-year-olds.'' Hansel and Gretel are 14-year-olds in the Scottish Opera production.

The parents - extremely cruel in the original fairy-tale - will receive a more straightforward depiction, said Tinkler. ``They are there to guard over the children. Even when the kids have done wrong and are punished for it, the parents are still there, loving and caring. For a parent to discipline a child is also an act of love''

The parents are not, he said, the ogres that the children see them as in the original fairy tale. Consequently (and possibly also controversially), at the children's scariest moment in the woods, the director has the parents reappear to tuck them in. ``I'm doing this because otherwise you only see the parents at the beginning, when they are cross and unpleasant, and in a rather artificial reconciliation at the end.''

There is, said Tinkler, ``a huge optimism'' in the piece. ``It demonstrates that you can go through the most extraordinary personal torment and it's okay, because you do come out the other side.

``In fact, though Hansel and Gretel, traditionally, is always associated with being a Christmas opera, with us - as it has evolved - it's become almost more an Easter opera, because it's to do with regeneration, rebirth, re-emergence from trauma.''

And to judge from a glimpse of the set, and numerous allusions made by the director, a certain symbol of Easter (try thinking of an egg) permeates the new production, perhaps at the expense of the orthodox gingerbread, and probably controversially.

Symbol seekers will no doubt spot the resonances and (by now) almost conventional parallels drawn between the mother and the witch in Act One and Act Three. Number symbolism (lots of it in the score itself) and dualities - reconciliations between brother and sister, mother and father, parent and child, heaven and earth - will also suffuse the production.

``Like the music itself, the tale is a panoply of ideas,'' says Tinkler. ``People will see in it what they want to see. There are deeper and darker resonances there for anyone who wants to pick them up.''

n Hansel and Gretel opens at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, on Friday at 7.15pm.