Hansel and Gretel - review

The original Brothers Grimm fairytale is deeply creepy; Humperdinck's 1893 opera version is generally less so, though the luxuriant score makes up for the loss. This new Scottish Opera production – a pretty, well sung but fairly banal rendition – was less so, still. Bill Bankes-Jones' direction and doggerel translation told the action straight, but he sanitised any psychological intrigue and stripped away the dark magic of the forest. There was little enchantment to the blunt rhyming couplets and a vague inevitability to the cheeky, cheerful sugarcane witch. This is Hansel and Gretel for the very faint-hearted.

It was nicely done, though. Tim Meacock's sets were handsome: huge towering tree trunks made of rough wooden slats that shift continuously. Dwarfing and disorientating the children (who, like us, can't see the top of the trees), they frame the tale's three locales (family home, thick of the forest and gingerbread house). The heart of the opera – act two's beautiful nocturnal scene, when a serene host of 14 gold-winged angels shuffle around the sleeping children – was elegantly done.

Humperdinck's orchestration alternates thick-woven Wagnerian tuttis and sparser, spookier configurations; under Emmanuel Joel-Hornak the orchestra sounded convincing in the former but bored and anaemic in the latter. Usually I would be all for keeping curtain down during the overture, but here we could have used some visual distraction.

It took a while for stage and pit to gel, but the singing was strong. Kai Rüütel and Ailish Tynan are an endearing title pair, vocally well matched and, though their mannerisms didn't quite clinch childishness, they had a sweet complicity between them. There were fine contributions from Paul Carey Jones as the boisterous father and Shuna Scott Sendall as the fretting mother, while Leah-Marian Jones played the flirtatious witch with vocal might and flair.