Productions of Humperdinck’s fairy tale opera usually draw an extensive, opulent contrast between the impoverished austerity of the home in which Hansel and Gretel live with their parents, and the Witch’s gingerbread house offering the illusion of an endless feast of enticing sweetmeats on which the famished children may gorge themselves. That contrast is present in Lucy Bailey’s production, particularly in the largelyblank canvases of the first two Acts in which the children find themselves enwrapped, before waking up in Act Three under a huge, chequered bedsheet and waited on by the Witch’s maids, ready with tiered cream cakes.
The devil, or rather the menace manifested by the Witch, is in the detail however, as the telling contrast is drawn between the specific materials that the children and the Witch have to work or deal with. As their father makes and distributes brooms, Hansel and Gretel play around with lumps of charcoal, and the dirty smocks they wear, like those of the children they liberate from the Witch, suggest that they all work (clearly for a pittance) as sweepers. Compared with those inedible, useless byproducts of their labour, the Witch offers instead the scrumptious treat of sweets and cakes. Once she is consigned to the oven with which the children had been threatened, her charred corpse is thrown out in triumph and reduced to ashes; but also, it seems, is the illusion of limitless, unearned luxury she represented. The connection is also made by the presence only of a wood burner at the centre of Hansel and Gretel’s bare house, pre-empting the Witch’s oven (here underground) where they nearly end up, along with her other victims turned into gingerbread. For all the triumph of liberation and revival that the young heroes bring to those others, presumably all they have to go back home to is a lesson learnt about temptation, and the same life of penury they had before. The sparse set suggests a harsh moral story to be undergone and the children finding their own way in the world, as there is no gingerbread house as such to offer even any specious, escapist fantasy (except a small toy as a visual allusion at the end of Act Two). And the environments of their home and then the forest in the first two Acts are more like paper Wendy houses – white and black respectively – onto which Hansel and Gretel project their childish doodles and imaginations.
Dramatic magic certainly comes from the performance – although not a full-size symphony orchestra, the Longborough Festival Orchestra bring ample Wagnerian sweep and instrumental resonance to Humperdinck’s rich score, alongside more intimate melodic charm in Karen Kamensek’s attentive direction. Emerging artists Joanna Harries and Rosalind Dobson are well matched in their easy-going innocence as the pair of young protagonists; Dobson distinguishes Gretel as a girl with slightly brighter, cleaner vocal tone, while Harries conveys on stage Hansel’s boyish raffishness. Laura Fleur and Kelli-Ann Masterson (also emerging artists) give neat, unobtrusive accounts of the Sandman and the Dew Fairy.
Darren Jeffery and Lee Bisset are appropriately bolder as the Father and Mother. Bisset also doubles up as the Witch and, whereas she is perhaps too strident as the frustrated Mother, she comes into her own as the sweet-toothed monster, characterised here not as a hideous old hag, but with Cruella de Vil-like allure, partial also to a cigarette and a bottle of gin as well as her broom stick. Her energy and charisma make up for the risquécomedy generated when the part is played in drag. The children of the Longborough Youth Chorus return a crisp, disciplined purity to the final scene. The production astutely carries off a serious moral message with comic, lively aplomb.
Further performances to 8 August
