The opera at West Green is back in the ‘green theatre’, rather than open air on the lake, but opened up at the back so that the house itself forms the backdrop for Verdi’s Falstaff. The lake and surrounding gardens would have provided the ideal setting for this opera, so that the basket of dirty linen with the fat knight improbably hidden in it could be chucked into the water, and the trees in the evening’s darkness conjuring the atmosphere for Windsor Forest at midnight in the last Act (especially with a perfectly clear full moon on the date of this performance).
The vista of lawn and house, beyond both the wooden stage with Herne’s oak and the orchestra, still offers an attractive setting for the work however, in which the singers play up its high jinks and buffoonery, not least Bardolfo and Pistola who are frequently seen tearing around the lawn or being chased. West Green’s grounds are still illumined, as in previous years, so we retreat from the auditorium among the lights and shadows, and can imagine the charmed, even sinister, environment of Windsor Forest about us after Verdi’s closing fugue has rung out. Colourful costumes add to the fun on stage, juxtaposing Elizabethan doublet and hoses of Shakespeare’s time for the men, with prominent cod pieces, suggesting something priapic and indecent, alongside purer, chaste white dress for the women with their various hennins, evoking the earlier time of the 15th century, when the drama is ostensibly set, during the reign of Henry IV.
Simon Thorpe is an avuncular, far-gone Sir John Falstaff here, with no point to make about the gender politics of his attempted seductions, but simply the lovable old rogue which inspired Shakespeare to base a whole drama around him after featuring him in the first Henry IV play. He embodies the part – who is rarely off the stage – with energy and quite smooth-toned volubility; the syllabic clarity of his diction accompanied by the firmly accented ‘oom-pah’ rhythm of the orchestra, as though a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song when he contemplates what he thinks is his imminent success with Alice, is especially amusing.
His servants, Simon Wilding’s Pistola and Peter Van Hulle’s Bardolfo, cultivate a deliberately rougher demeanour and voice which makes all the wittier Verdi’s ironic quotations from his Requiem at the opening of Act Two with the pretence of contrition. More musically conventional, but dramatically engaging performances come from the two other male principals, John-Kristof Bouton vociferous and emphatic as the would-be cuckold Fold, and Trystan Llyr Griffiths mellifluous and resounding as Fenton, the lover of his daughter Nanetta. Jonathan Cooke is a terser Dr Caius, the more wealthy and socially established man whom Ford would have her marry instead.
Galina Averina makes a strong impact as Alice, navigating a deft course between comic levity and irony, and a commanding assertiveness. Equally striking for her more tender sparkle is Lorena Paz Nieto as her daughter Nanetta. Felicity Buckland is a more discreet Meg Page, the other object of Falstaff’s amorous escapades, while Carolyn Dobbin communicates a seen-it-all-before mellowness as Mistress Quickly.
Conducting a reduced orchestration of the score by Tony Burke, Jonathan Lyness draws a performance of often chamber-like immediacy and conversational vividness from the instruments of the West Green House Orchestra, but they combine to provide suitable heft when required. The brisk, but not rushed, pace matches the frivolity on stage, and the English surtitles by Lydia French are endearingly idiomatic, all making for an entertaining summer’s evening.
Curtis Rogers
Falstaff
Composer: Giuseppe Verdi
Libretto: Arrigo Boito, after William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV
Cast and production staff:
Sir John Falstaff – Simon Thorpe; Ford – John-Kristof Bouton; Alice Ford – Galina Averina; Mistress Quickly – Carolyn Dobbin; Fenton – Trystan Llyr Griffiths; Nanetta – Lorena Paz Nieto; Dr Caius – Jonathan Cooke; Meg Page – Felicity Buckland; Bardolfo – Peter Van Hulle
Director and Designer – Richard Studer; Lighting Designer – Sarah Bath; Wardrobe Supervisor – Jill Rolfe; Conductor – Jonathan Lyness; West Green House Opera Orchestra
West Green House Gardens, Hartley Wintney, Hampshire, Sunday, July 21, 2024.
Top image: Scene from Falstaff.
All photos by Matthew Williams-Ellis.