Hansel and Gretel
By Englebert Humperdinck
White’s Hotel
Review: Tom Mooney
Wexford’s take on this famous opera based on the short story by the Brothers Grimm succeeds on so many levels it is impossible to know here to begin.
It is an effusively charming production, from the pared set of cardboard, inventively recycled to simulate both forest and the witch’s house, to the imaginatively realised dream sequences. The omnipresent cardboard also works as a visual metaphor for childhood poverty, though this is not implied,
The challenge for director Jack Furness, one imagines, was overcoming the expectations of an audience acquainted with bigger and better budgeted productions of this Christmas favourite.
Wexford goes back to basics: there are similarities with the school staging of Noye’s Fludd in the cramped village church in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.
Faced with the choice of psychological drama for adults or a fairy tale for children, Furness wisely opted for the latter: the imaginative prowess of stage manager Katie Thackeray and costume supervisor Frances White bring alive difficult scenes – falling asleep under the benign spell of the Sandman and being woken by the Dew Fairy – with the most limited of props.
But less continues to be more, and because Anna Jeffers, Emma Nash, Kate Allen and Sheldon Baxter can act as well as they can sing (the Prayer Duet is beautifully rendered), the production qualities never falter, and the opera, written in 1893 in three acts, surfs on a wave of imagination and enthusiasm.
Thankfully, there is frivolity and there is plenty of humour, but never at the expense of wringing every ounce of magic from the story, such as the depiction – very simple – of the counterpart for the scenes involving the Sandman and the Dew Fairy.
The piano accompaniment was a nod to the composer’s original development of Adelheid Wette’s songs into a Singspiel, a year before they became a full opera. While adults portraying kids on stage can be toe-curdling, or kids playing themselves, there wasn’t a misplaced step in this production.
