Review of Opera North's Hansel and Gretel at The Lowry

The first of Opera North’s ‘fairytale’ sequence of operas, at The Lowry this week, is one of those pieces that were originally designed for the Christmas season (like The Nutcracker in the ballet repertory) in the 19^th century, and really only take on magic qualities in that context even now.

Coming to us in the second week of Lent, it couldn’t quite click into that slot, but there was much to admire in the performances of the three central characters – Hansel, Gretel and the Witch.

The story is meant to be very much the same as you read in books: the children live on the edge of a forest and wander into it when they’re supposed to be picking strawberries; they discover a house all made of sugar biscuits and take a few munches; the witch who lives inside catches them and is about to bake them both for dinner when they outwit her, dispatch her into her own oven and live happily ever after.

In Edward Dick’s production there was an attempt at transposition into the present day, with the kids in the kitchen of a high-rise flat, glued to their electronic devices and tempted by a fridge-ful of high-fat-content goodies rather than sylvan gingerbread.

It doesn’t quite work, and you wonder why a poverty-stricken inner city family have acquired a very expensive hand-held video camera which is used throughout the first two acts to create jerky, live projected back images, dissolving with limited success into impressions of a forest. Are they lost in a gaming world, rather than the great outdoors? Maybe. It all comes back to reality with a clunk near the end when the curtain falls, awkwardly, to conceal an all-too-traditional resetting of the set, so that we can see there’s a happy Christmas at the close.

The projection is very effectively used for a pre-filmed sequence to accompany the long postlude to act two, though, which re-interprets ‘The Sandman’ (a German folklore character we don’t really have here, who puts children to sleep with, I suppose, fairy dust) as a dream in which grandma who gives them a great time at the seaside.

The great thing about this opera is its folk-song inspired music, which has a simplicity and charm all its own (and is written with such contrapuntal skill that even reduced to its bare lines on five instruments, as Clonter Opera tried once, it sounds marvellous – still more in full orchestral dress). Christoph Altstaedt conducted the Orchestra of Opera North with skill and subtlety.

Above all, the performances from Katie Bray (Hansel), Fflur Wyn (Gretel) and Susan Bullock (mother and Witch) are the outstanding feature of the show, the former two singing with purity and clarity all through, and the latter really getting into the spirit of the thing in a kind of Great Witch-ish Bake-Off in act three. Makes a change from Elektra, I suppose.