Hansel and Gretel, Scottish Glasgow Opera/ Dream Hunter, Wilton's Music Hall, review

Rupert Christiansen reviews Hansel and Gretel at Scottish Glasgow Opera and Dream Hunter at Wilton's Music Hall.

Leah-Marian Jones (Witch), Kai Ruutel (Hansel) in Hansel & Gretel for Scottish Opera
Increasingly charming: Leah-Marian Jones (Witch), Kai Ruutel (Hansel) in Hansel & Gretel for Scottish Opera Credit: Photo: Richard Campbell.

Hansel: * * *

Dream Hunter: * *

Unfashionably, Bill Bankes-Jones takes a refreshingly naïve view of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel.

There are no paedophiles or critiques of consumerism in his new Scottish Opera production. Tim Meacock’s designs broadly evoke a fairy-tale rural Germany in the 19th century. The gingerbread house is made of gingerbread and its imprisoned children wear dirndls and lederhosen. A tear-jerking tableau of benign white-robed angels with golden wings ends Act I, and there’s an unironic merry dance at the end.

Nostalgic adults in the audience loved it all, and I was increasingly charmed myself. I only wonder whether horrid cynical children, fed on Roald Dahl and JK Rowling, might find it filled with a teaspoon too much sugar and crave more of the story’s darker side.

Kai Rüütel and Ailish Tynan made a game Hansel and Gretel, but the show was stolen by Leah-Marian Jones’s comic turn as the Witch – wittily presented as a simpering rococo dairymaid, rather than a toothless hag. Emmanuel Joël-Hornak conducted a nimble, lightweight account of the score, minimising its Wagnerian pretensions.

Dream Hunter is a new one-act opera by Nicola LeFanu, with a libretto by John Fuller, inspired by a folk-belief circulating in rural Corsica that some visionary people hunt in their dreams, and that the human prey they catch presages its real-life death. The idea is haunting, and Fuller treats it rather in the manner of the poetic dramas of Yeats and Synge.

Alas, it never catches operatic fire. LeFanu’s music, scored for chamber ensemble, is neat and nicely crafted, but the atmosphere it generates is weirdly tame and genteel.

Lontano contributed fine instrumental playing under Odaline de la Martinez, and Carmen Jakobi’s simple production was competently delivered by a cast of four. If only the composer had given them some richer meat to chew.

'Hansel and Gretel’ runs at Theatre Royal, Glasgow (0844 871 7647) until Feb 12