While the audience is still looking for a seat, there is already a lot of activity on the stage. There is drilling and knocking on an iron walkway that leads to a huge, professionally fitted kitchen on the left side of the stage. Children are stirring bowls at the stainless steel worktops. Liquid chocolate drips from their ladles.
The two-year-delayed premiere of Benjamin Brittens was shown in Parktheater Eindhoven A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Opera South. Britten based his opera on William Shakespeare’s comedy of the same name. Theater director Ola Mafaalani, who is making her debut with Opera Zuid, has moved the story from a moonlit fairy forest to a dimly lit kitchen with children (the impeccably singing girls of the Limburg Choir School, bravo!) in aprons.
Britten turned the four storylines from Shakespeare’s play into a three-act play and wrote layered music for it. Karel Deseure energetically leads the South Netherlands Philharmonic through all the atmospheres and colors that belong to the different situations. The percussion at the fairy realm is eerie and fairytale at the same time.
Squire
The voices of the elves and their rulers are high: children (the elves), a coloratura soprano as Queen Titania and a countertenor as her husband Oberon, a role by Jan Wouters. He sings well, but fails to get his voice into the room. However, he convinces with a large tattoo on his chest and his macho body language like a frustrated Oberon who is arguing with Titania about a page of hers, an orphaned boy that he insists on as a squire.
Oberon uses his accomplice Puck for this, a speaking role by the well-cast aerialist (air acrobat) Dreya Weber. With her dark, mature voice and face, but young-looking, athletic body, with which she spins high in the air and twirls in pieces of dust, her age is difficult to estimate. She turns Puck into a fluttering, elusive creature. The tumbling trumpet as the leitmotif enhances the acrobatic feats.
Puck must pick a magical flower whose juice, dripped into the eyes of sleeping creatures, will make you madly in love with the first one you see upon waking. In the direction of Mafaalani there is no magical flower juice, but chocolate sauce, and that is fine.
Sensually, the sweet good is smeared with a wooden spoon over the chins of the ignorant souls. Titania – a role played by Kristina Bitenc, powerful, supple and attractive – wakes up to see not Oberon, but the utterly overwhelmed craftsman Bottom, who has been given a donkey’s head (now replaced by a teddy bear’s body) for the fun of Puck and suddenly subject to Titania’s lustful affection.
The composer who kept the opera relevant
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) was an English conductor and pianist, but above all one of the most important composers of the 20th century. He kept opera as an art form relevant with masterpieces such as Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Screw† Few came to compose as easily as Britten: he was the man who could do anything and would never convert to an -ism. For colleagues who completely focused on atonality and started working with sequences after the war, Britten was someone to rebel against. Yet much of his music is also dark and he crossed the boundaries of Western harmony. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960) he contrasts that darkness with sweet, childlike music, as in the final chorus Now, Until the Break of Day†
Then Puck makes another mistake with four mortals (second storyline), causing them to chase each other. The romantic harmony vocals are mainly supported by the excellent singing women: Liesbeth Devos as Helena and Leonie van Rheden as Hermia.
The group of bony craftsmen who had just been hammering have decided that they want to stage a play at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, which is being prepared out of sight all the while. It’s a good idea to have the entire opera played in the kitchen of Theseus’ palace. In this way, Mafaalani nicely covers the various intrigues. The disadvantage is that you never hear baritone Quirijn de Lang, worthy in the role of Theseus, and smooth alt-mezzo Eva Kroon as Hippolyta.
Opera in an opera
The play about the mythological love couple Pyramus and Thisbe as opera-within-an-opera (with operetta-like tunes) makes it a long sit. But if you threw that out, you’d miss the funny Marc Pantus as friendly and sometimes distraught Bottom, and also Christopher Gillett, who is hilariously spinning in a female role.
Everyone is dressed in strapless dresses of turquoise tulle in the last act. While men elaborately pull the bodice up over their missing breasts, the why of the dresses escapes you, but the smile on your face won’t fade for a while.
fate
The myth of Pyramus and Thisbe is the only fateful love story in A Midsummer Night’s Dream prevents. A Romeo-and-Julia-esque story: the two are neighbors, but contact is forbidden. A sneaky date under a mulberry ends badly. He thinks she is dead and kills herself. She finds him and takes her own life. Their blood mixes and colors the mulberries a deep, grief-stricken red.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Opera
By Opera South. Directed by Ola Mafaalani.
22/5, Park Theater, Eindhoven, tour until 21/6†