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16 June 2010
Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
"FAREWELL TO GARSINGTON"
By: Julia Gasper. If there has to be a last season of the Garsington Opera, Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the ideal work to celebrate everything unique and wonderful about this much-loved Oxford festival. This was quintessential Garsington. For twenty-one years, the manor-house owned by the Ingrams family has offered its particular blend of midsummer magic, a magic in which the music, the house, the gardens and the village have all played their part. It is the rare luxury of opera performed on a small, intimate scale in an outdoor setting where the stage world seems to merge with the Elizabethan architecture and formal gardens with their classical statues and topiary. It creates a fantasy, dream world just perfect for Shakespeare’s comedy, with its mixture of classical Greek myth and Elizabethan rural folklore. Set at the height of summer, at night, and full of allusions to flowers, birds, and insects, with fairies named Moth, Peaseblossom and Mustardseed, the opera was a most felicitous choice for the time and the place. Even the new moon played its role on cue, appearing “like to a silver bow new-bent in heaven”, in the words of Queen Hippolyta. Garsington Opera has never shrunk from presenting innovative, challenging and little-known repertoire. There are some people for whom Benjamin Britten is still a composer with a harsh, unknown “modern” idiom. Sitting in the rose garden in the interval, I overheard a group of ladies, dining on champagne and strawberries, lamenting that there was no “music” in this opera. Music there certainly is, of a singular and whimsical kind, orchestrated with Britten’s bold imagination and sensitive colouring, music that ranges from the intellectual delights of fugue to the downright comical. There are moments when Britten’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s text seems inspired. There are other moments when it seems tortuous or unintelligible, but while many composers might create different music for these incomparable words, none has created such a stimulating sound-world. It is sometimes beautiful but never predictable or cosy, and it is infused with the spirit of nature. The stage set by designer Francis O’Connor also horrified some of the more conservative members of the audience, but I liked it. A surrealistic vision of broken bedsteads, quilts, children’s toys and a helter-skelter, it created on one level a dream-like, surreal dimension and on another, metaphorical level presented the idea of disorder, dislocation and disturbance which is such an important theme of this story. True lovers are wrenched apart, spouses quarrel, Nature is turned upside-down when Titania falls in love with Bottom, ass’s head and all. We see the seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery set. The spring, the summer, The chiding autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries; and the mazèd world By their increase, knows not which is which. And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension. We are their parents and originals. Clearly there is nothing new about the idea of climate change, or the theory that we are responsible for it. Here is the very same idea written by Shakespeare in 1595, describing real events of the early 1590s in the English countryside. I enjoyed the subtle jokes in this opera production, such as the oversized Narnia wardrobe, a fine Victorian piece of furniture, stuffed with fur coats, through which many of the characters entered into what they did not realize was fairy-land. It all added to the atmosphere of fantasy. Little boys as fairies dressed in dirty old services uniforms were certainly curious but succeeded in getting us as far away as possible from the sentimental, Arthur Rackham style of fairy. The boys of the Trinity choir swarmed over the stage, playful, fresh-voiced and dirty-faced. The wonderful comedy of the play of Pyramus and Thisby as put on by the Athenian workmen was grand entertainment. Here is Britten’s music at its most uncompromising and irreverent. The end of Garsington Opera can never be a happy event, but it is a triumphant one. The company is not winding up, but planning to move to the Wormsley estate at Stokenchurch, near High Wycombe, the home of the Getty family. If all goes well, and they obtain both the planning permission and the necessary funds, they will open there in summer 2011 with a fresh season of opera. If you would like to help with the fund-raising appeal, get in touch with either cerian@garsingtonopera.org or Jane@garsingtonopera.org |
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