SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Humperdinck, Hansel and Gretel: (Revival) Soloists, Orchestra of Welsh National Opera, Thomas Rösner, conductor, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 30.5.2008 (GPu)

Conductor: Thomas Rösner
Original Director: Richard Jones
Revival Director: Benjamin Davies
Designer: John Macfarlane
Lighting Designer: Jennifer Tipton
Assistant Director / Choreographer: Linda Dobell
Revival Choreographer: Maggie Rawlinson
Chorus Master: Stephen Harris

Gretel: Rebecca Evans
Hansel: Cora Burggraaf
The Mother: Mary Llloyd-Davies
Peter: Eddie Wade
Sandman / Dew Fairy: Joanne Boag
The Witch: Graham Clark
Children: Jessica Barnes, Rhys Battle, Aron Cyman, Beca Dafydd, James Farrow, Anest Glyn, Aimee Hartington-Clark, Rhiannon Hunt, Jessica James, Gwenan Jenkins-Jones, Marco Palladino, Loti Parry, Lucy Pearce, Ella Powell, Dafudd Rizzo, Katy Willis

Rebecca Evans (Gretel) and Cora Burggraaf (Hansel)

There’s a marvellous passage in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake which speaks of “alices when they were yung and easily freudened”. Rather as Lewis Carroll’s Alice books seem designed for psychoanalytical interpretation, so the stories of the Brothers Grimm, in retrospect, seemed to have been destined to fascinate Jungians and Freudians alike. Without  ponderously evoking the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, this now well-known production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel by Richard Jones is certainly one in which the events of the libretto – which we get to hear it not in Adelheid Wette’s original German but in an English translation by David Pountney – are unmistakably shown to contain Hansels and Gretels who are “yung and easily freudened”.

For all the obvious exceptions (which prove the rule?) it remains the case that opera, from Peri’s Dafne and Monteverdi’s Orfeo to Philip Glass’s Orphée and Birtwistle’s The Minotaur is essentially a form most at home in the articulation of myth. In Humperdinck’s opera, Jones locates the mythological dimension implicit both in fairy-story and dream, especially post-Jung (especially in the case of fairy story) and post-Freud (where dream is concerned). This shouldn’t be allowed to give the impression that the evening is in any way ponderous or excessively solemn – there are plenty of laughs and a self-awareness that prevents excessive seriousness; indeed there is much wit in the production.

The production and its theatrical gestures are centered on food and eating (or non eating), the stage sets essentially consisting of two kitchens in the outer acts and a dream banqueting hall magically contained in the forest in the central act. In the first kitchen, the home of Hansel and Gretel and their quarrelling parents we are very much in the realm of poverty, of existence lived without knowing where the next meal will come from or, indeed, if it will come at all. Rebecca Evans and Cora Burggraaf, in their long scene before the arrival of The Mother, represented the dynamics of a brother-sister relationship very effectively, by turns quarrelling and threatening, loving and teasing, mutually dependent and mutually scornful. Burggraaf was a coltish Hansel, Evans a winningly girlish Gretel. The bareness of the kitchen set and its deep perspective, emphasised the increased importance (as in the case of the spilt milk) of what might in other times and places have been trivial. The return of The Mother – sung in a somewhat squally and strident fashion by Mary Lloyd-Davies – added another dimension to this picture of a family under pressure, as did the return of Peter (interesting that he gets a name, where The Mother doesn’t!), drunken and flush with temporary economic success. Such as its pleasures and safeties were, this domestic setting contrasted with the surrounding dangers of the forest, to where, of course, The Mother had dispatched Hansel and Gretel.

That the dangerous forest looks oddly like the kitchen at home which Hansel and Gretel have just left (and was equipped with the same sink in the same spot) need hardly be much of a surprise. The forest itself was represented by little more than four Paul Delvaux-like figures, like dark men in the process of transforming into trees, from the top downwards. The stage was dominated by a long, long table, its grandeur so unlike the furnishings of Act I’s kitchen. In a sense we were inside the heads of Hansel and Gretel as much as we were outside the cottage in the darkness of the woods; this sense was compounded after the Sandman (who had more than a little in common with the Sandman later imagined by Hoffman and analysed by Freud) had put them to sleep. The guardian angels of the original libretto took the form of winged figures with the heads of pigs (and chefs’ hats!), assisted by a neatly suited butler with a fish head (or was it the head of a frog, or even a snake?). This was the landscape of dream with a vengeance – a dream of uncomplaining service and abundant food, a dream of all that life at home didn’t provide. The whole tableau, enacted in slow motion, perfectly complemented Humperdinck’s rhapsodic music in a startling and memorable piece of theatre.

Joanne Boag as the Dew Fairy

In Act III the witch’s kitchen was abounding in equipment and ingredients, just the opposite of that back home. In the cannibalistic slapstick, in Graham Clark’s witch – a wild fusion of Hansel and Gretel’s parents, with an admixture of Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire – there was a nightmare reinvention of that domestic kitchen and the life lived there. But brother and sister are about to wake up, to cross the threshold into something approaching adulthood, as they rescue themselves by outwitting the adult world. The opera, for all its seeming slightness, enacts a rite of passage, a double process of maturation. The glories of “sight” are extolled at the end of the opera – in effect those of understanding gained through the experience (in dream) of the dark, and of its new place in the daylight world.

Throughout this still interesting and effective production (first staged in 1998) the Orchestra of the Welsh National Opera, under the direction of the young Austrian Thomas Rösner, relished Humperdinck’s rich orchestration, their playing pointed and vivid. This opera seems to have run like a thread through the career of Rebecca Evans. As long ago as 1990 I saw her making her professional debut in a small scale WNO touring production of Hansel and Gretel; rather later her interpretation of Gretel was part of the 2008 Grammy-winning Charles Mackerras recording of the opera (Chandos 3143). Here she was a fine, energetic Gretel, bringing to the role a sufficient degree of sophistication to mark her out as the older of the two siblings, and her voice was in very fine order. As her brother, Cora Burggraaf was occasionally just a little underpowered vocally, but was generally clear and expressive and brought a distinctive charm to the role. Eddie Wade’s Peter was impressive and assured and Joanne Boag’s voice was rich and resonant in her two roles as the Sandman and the Dew Fairy (though it is surely one of the few lapses in judgement in the production that the Dew Fairy is more comical than magical). Only Mary Lloyd-Davies’s Mother was less than fully convincing, in what is, in any case, a rather thankless role. Special praise should go to the children from two Cardiff schools, Ysgol Gymraeg Melin Gruffydd and Llanishen Fach Primary School, whose acting and singing were exemplary.

One wouldn’t want this to be the only production of Hansel and Gretel that one ever saw, nor, perhaps is it the ideal one to which to take smaller children. But it is an intelligent and distinctive production, its non-traditional nature entirely warranted by a coherent reading of the work. The themes of the opera – good and evil, innocence and experience, growing up, the real and the fantastic – are focussed, within the language of dream, around the central symbol of food, of eating and being eaten. The focus is enhanced by some marvellous painted curtains between the acts. Food (and its absence) is everywhere, in a production which is well sung and well played and makes for some memorable theatrical moments.

Glyn Pursglove

Pictures © Brian Tarr

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