With festive cheer all around and London fizzing with handsome Nutcrackers and dastardly Hooks, surely the Royal Opera could have come up with something more seasonally alive than this grim Hansel and Gretel? The worst offence of Antony McDonald’s leaden staging is to be forgettable, which at least made this second encounter with it feel as fresh (if that’s quite the word) as the first.
In recent years there have been several outstanding stagings of this sometimes harrowing, always beautiful opera, but for some reason its charms elude our premier opera house. Where’s the magic here? Humperdinck’s glorious dream sequence alone can inspire directors to make this hardened critic well up. Here, nothing. Just a few Disneyfied offcuts from other fairy tales who roam the stage to little purpose and no sense of a visionary hand on their tiller.
It's a good idea to present this family opera in English, and the many children in the audience will have appreciated that gesture. But was Kelley Rourke’s dismal effort, a porridge of suspect rhymes and dreary doggerel, really the best one available? David Pountney’s translation is now standard, and rightly so because it works on so many levels, whereas this one is dead on arrival.
McDonald’s baleful concept as director-designer makes it unsurprising that his gingerbread house should be fat-free except for an illuminated glacé cherry on a roof that’s been stabbed through with a giant cake knife. In other respects it’s a dead ringer for the Bates residence in Psycho. The children are reduced to scraping the footpath for anything vaguely edible, because nothing else is. At least the horror movie trope is sustained to the bitter/sweet end as (spoiler alert!) the wicked witch comes to a grisly end in a vat of molten chocolate.
Enough of this carping. What’s here to enjoy? The singing, certainly, and that includes the children from the Cardinal Vaughan School and the Grey Coat Hospital, none of whom feature in the printed programme despite their excellence. (This recent habit of the ROH is as perplexing as it is disgraceful.) Mark Wigglesworth conducts with his customary grace and attention to internal balance; indeed, all the magic on display emanates not from the forest but from his lively baton.
Anna Stéphany and Anna Devin are fine in the title roles (they alternate with Hanna Hipp and Lauren Fagan across the run) and if their characterisations lack zest, or even a sense of childhood, that is down to the translation and direction. It is hard to fathom what even the most gifted diva could do with such limp material. Darren Jeffery and Susan Bickley do well with thin pickings as the children’s parents while Isabela Díaz and Sarah Dufresne contribute exquisite cameos as the Sandman and Dew Fairy.
It is Rosie Aldridge, however, who rips up the production book and whips up a storm as the lip-smacking Witch. She brings the stage alive through the gleeful force of a personality – hers or her character’s, it matters not which – that persists right through to her scene-stealing curtain call.
