Topsy Turvy Royal Illusions

Garsington stages an imaginative Midsummer Night's Dream and a "marmite" Un giorno di regno

‘I know a bank where the wild thyme grows’ Iestyn Davies (Oberon) gives Puck (Jerome Marsh-Reid) his instructions Picture © Julian Guidera

When Garsington Opera announced its 2024 season, a few eyebrows were raised by the inclusion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It seemed to be tempting fate to schedule Britten’s magical opera so soon after Glyndebourne’s recent revival of the famed Peter Hall staging, and to ask Netia Jones to come up with a new production of the very same opera she had directed for the Aldeburgh Festival as recently as 2017.

Since then Jones has furnished Garsington with a Zauberflöte in 2018 - which I didn’t see - and Handel’s Amadigi in 2021 - which I did. Like those two shows, this new Dream had a mixed reception in the mainstream press, but I found it Garsington’s most rewarding new production so far this summer.

It is pointless to claim - as some of my colleagues did - that Jones’s staging is no match for the Glyndebourne Dream: Hall’s version may be a timeless classic, but it is certainly not the only way of visualising Britten and Pears’s clever adaptation of Shakespeare (completed in six months, a record for the invariably painstaking composer). Since its premiere in Aldeburgh’s tiny Jubilee Hall in 1960, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has become the Britten opera that audiences love most - even if it is by no means his greatest work for the theatre. Of the 23 stagings I have seen since 1978 (Welsh National Opera), by far the majority have opted for a more austere, less naturalistic vision of Shakespeare’s ‘Athenian’ forest than Hall and his designer, John Bury, at Glyndebourne. Britten did not live to see it, but Pears did, averring that ‘Ben would have loved it’. I have seen more ‘contemporary’ versions, including one - directed by long-term Britten associate Colin Graham at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis - that remains etched in my memory: a punkish Oberon and Tytania (in Shakespearean times ‘punk’ meant prostitute, hoodlum or ruffian) leading a band of fairies on roller blades, against a backdrop of New York’s Central Park in the 1990s, with upside-down trees and skyscrapers.