FOUR STARS

 

Food features strongly in Garsington Opera’s new take on Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. There’s never enough to eat at home, so it’s no wonder that Hansel and Gretel are mightily interested when they disappear into the forest and discover some giant, brightly coloured liquorice allsorts, and cupcakes overflowing with lashings of cream.

Niki Turner’s set design also features a giant storybook flat on the stage. As its pages are turned, magical pop-up cottages appear. But in contrast to the colourful fun, gaunt, leafless trees in the background suggest venturing into this forest might not be a good idea – their effect reinforced by the viciously cold draught that whipped across the auditorium the night I saw the show.

The set perfectly complements director Olivia Fuchs’s take on the opera: “I feel the children have been traumatised, and when that happens you start developing fantasies about the things you don’t have, and the things you want,” she told me in an Oxford Times interview. Her vision is based on her own experience of being brought up in prosperous West Berlin, and crossing the Wall to visit relations in the impoverished East.

Claudia Huckle and Anna Devin interact and sing superbly as Hansel and Gretel, with Devin’s bright, light soprano voice playing off Huckle’s warm contralto. Huckle has an expressive face too, making it plain Hansel may be hungry, but he has not lost his boyish high spirits. Yvonne Howard is a vociferously nagging Mother, while William Dazeley has fun as a teetering, drunk Father. There is fine singing from Rhiannon Llewellyn as Sandman and Ruth Jenkins as the Dew Fairy, but Susan Bickley is given no chance as the Witch: sporting a pink curly wig, she isn’t scary. Martin André’s conducting exactly comple-ments the action in this refreshingly unschmaltzy production.

Opera Pavilion, Wormsley Performances July 5, 7, 9, 11 Call 01865 361636