Hansel and Gretel review – vivacious staging of Humperdinck’s benign fairytale

There are two particularly good reasons not to miss the Royal Opera’s Christmas revival of its 2018 production of Hansel and Gretel. Both are musical. Mark Wigglesworth’s conducting, and the playing of the Royal Opera House orchestra, each come out of the top drawer.

Wigglesworth possesses a symphonic sense of line that allows Humperdinck’s benign score to unfold as it should. But he also has a theatrical instinct for when to push on and when to step back. He brings out the music’s Mahlerian qualities as well its Wagnerian and Brahmsian ones. He is the star of the show. The ROH orchestra played superbly for him. In the hands of its leader Magnus Johnston, one violin phrase that otherwise you might barely notice seems to float in the air like a benediction.

On stage things are more problematic. Modern productions have tended to seek out the dark side of the Grimm brothers’ tale, delving into the cruelties and oppressive danger of adults to children, with scary post-Freudian stagings to match. The problem, which Antony McDonald’s production rightly understands, is that Humperdinck’s version barely has a dark side.

Though the opera’s characters are peasants in a German never-never land, Hansel and Gretel is a 19th century bourgeois parable. Its animating spirits are childhood innocence, the nuclear family and religious faith. The score tells you this unerringly, from its devotional start to its high-minded finish, and above all at the close of act two, when 14 angels protect the sleeping children in the forest.

McDonald’s staging goes a long way to rescuing Hansel and Gretel the way Humperdinck conceived it. But reclaiming the opera’s innocence also makes it more boring. Hansel and Gretel is aimed at a confident and pious Wilhelminian German middle-class audience that no longer exists. The production tries to dodge this with occasional surrealist strokes and by populating it with Disneyland characters from other Grimm stories, as well as a gingerbread house that is straight out of Hitchcock’s Psycho. But this deprives us of the angels, who are the consolatory magic heart of the opera.

Even so, the resulting muddle is all vivaciously done. Kelley Rourke’s excellent English translation brings immediacy and there is a strong ensemble feel to the whole thing. The title roles are attractively taken by Anna Stéphany, a vocally distinguished Hansel, and by Anna Devin’s bright-voiced and feminist Gretel. Susan Bickley and Darren Jeffery are the put-upon but dependable parents. Isabela Díaz brings the necessary magic to the Sandman, as does Sarah Dufresne to the Dew Fairy. Rosie Aldridge’s Witch, a rich-voiced pantomime dame, making the most of every moment, provides a theatrical star turn. Alternative casts will take some roles later in the run.