How we respond to any production of Humperdinck’s musical Märchenspiel (Fairy Tale) may depend on whether we want to explore our inner child and be charmed by eye-catching visuals or a wish to be transported to a sinisterly realm that is the stuff of nightmares. Hailed by Richard Strauss as a “masterpiece”, the composer’s 1893 stage work can be regarded as an opera for children, and while this may have been a consideration for director Lucy Bailey and set designer Anisha Fields, they clearly prefer to probe the work’s dark undertones with a fresh and individual perspective.
In keeping with the work’s underlying gloom, where gruelling poverty, a creepy forest and a child-devouring witch occupy the fantastical plot, Bailey and Fields adopt a cheerless approach that, to my mind, seems antithetical to the sumptuous tones of Humperdinck’s post-Wagnerian score. There is little for a child to feast its eyes on this largely empty stage, and any sense of colour is eschewed in a space mostly devoid of props. What passes for a set is a white paper scrim on which childlike drawings of cottages have been scribbled. So far, all very monochrome and the paucity of accessories is presumably intended to evoke the family’s straitened circumstances. No less sparse are the stick-like trees of the crepuscular Act 2, more of a shadowy forest clearing where the children collect berries and then find themselves lost.
Colour later arrives in Act 3 with a huge, red-chequered bedsheet under which the children lie, their singing interrupted by the appearance of a grotesque tongue. Elsewhere, a coffee trolley is borne along by the Dew Fairy, attired as an old-fashioned hotel chambermaid, and a band of chefs bear an assortment of enticing cakes. It is Lee Bisset’s witch (she doubles as the children’s mother) who provides the most striking image, her smear of monstrously applied lipstick, pillar box red two-piece (with matching fixtures and fittings) and voluminous hair combine to create an unsettling image, that might immediately summon a safeguarding application. She conjures both Margaret Thatcher and Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. A fire pit does duty for an oven (its interior invisible from the audience) into which our enchantress is ultimately hurled. Some brief pyrotechnics add further to accumulating tensions.
Central to the success of this production is the casting, and claiming our attention throughout are Joanna Harries, as Hansel and Rosalind Dobson as Gretel. So credible is their portrayal, with physical gestures agile and gawky by turns, that this well-matched pair (belonging to Longborough’s commitment to emerging artists) have clearly not forgotten how to be children. Dobson’s clear voiced Gretel is a delight, her pure soprano complimenting Harries’ warm mezzo in the jaunty phrases of Act 2’s ‘cuckoo’ duet and again in the flowing lines of the Angel’s Prayer.
Presiding over them is Lee Bissett as their harried and exhausted looking mother later emerging as an intimidating witch. Her facial expressions variously traverse a growing irritability with her unruly brood and a malevolent grin that would strike fear into any impressionable child. Her well projected tone (she was Brünnhilde at Longborough’s ‘Ring’ cycle two years ago) is well matched by Darren Jeffery (Wotan in the same production) as her drunken husband – excelling in his boisterous ‘tra, la, la-ing’. Laura Fleur and Kelli-Ann Masterson offer gratifying accounts, delivering their cameo roles with assurance and nicely sung contributions respectively as Sandman and Dew Fairy.
Equally assured are the singers of the Longborough Youth Chorus who enter into the spirit of their various appearances with commendable confidence, their voices adding uplifting tones to the closing scene. In the pit Karen Kamensek is a rigorous guide to the 50 or so members of the Longborough Festival Orchestra, navigating her way through Tony Burke’s reduced score with well-judged tempi (especially in the waltz sequences) and enabling solo passages to make their mark. Enthusiasm occasionally gets the better of the players when balance between pit and stage is compromised. That tiny niggle aside, there’s still plenty of enchantment in the overall sound with Kamensek sprinkling enough fairy dust for the music to rise above the work’s Gothic darkness.
David Truslove
Hänsel and Gretel
Music: Engelbert Humperdinck
Libretto: Adelheid Wette – with an English translation by Sir David Pountney
Cast and Production Staff:
Gretel – Rosalind Dobson; Hansel – Joanna Harries; Mother /Witch – Lee Bisset; Father –Darren Jeffery; Sandman –Laura Fleur; Dew Fairy – Kelly-Ann Masterson; Longborough Youth Chorus
Director – Lucy Bailey; Designer & Costumes – Anisha Fields; Lighting – Ben Ormerod; Movement – Michael Ashcroft; Longborough Festival Orchestra; Conductor – Karen Kamensek
Longborough Festival Opera, Moreton-in-Marsh, 4 August 2026
All photos © Matthew Williams-Ellis