Composer: Engelbert Humperdinck
Director: Guido Martin-Brandis
Musical Director: Giannis Giannopoulos
The wonderful pocket-sized opera company, Opera Kipling, returns to Camden Fringe with another enticing offering: Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1893 Hansel & Gretel. And it’s another gem.
Humperdinck – not to be confused with the 1960s pop star – uses a version of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale that is less dark than the version that we know. There’s cruelty, but the children’s impoverished parents don’t deliberately throw them out of the cottage to fend for themselves in the woods. Instead, the mother innocently sends them out to pick strawberries. Once in the woods, it’s the familiar story. Hansel and Gretel find the witch’s gingerbread house. The witch catches Hans and starts fattening him up for the pot. But Humperdinck has added the reassuring presence of angels and spirits, so we know it’ll turn out well. The children successfully outwit the witch, shoving her into the oven where she turns into gingerbread.
The music is a delight: rich in appealing tunes and gloriously orchestrated. In composing the work, Humperdinck tapped into the nineteenth-century German Romantic tradition of folk song but the other important influence is Wagner, whose protégé he became. Hansel and Gretel would in turn influence Richard Strauss and Dvorak.
Here, under the masterful direction of Guido Martin-Brandis, the five-strong cast gives terrific performances. Soprano Rebecca Milford has a beautiful voice, and looks perfect as the somewhat bossy little girl. Mezzo Wiktoria Wizner makes a wonderful Hansel, not just vocally, but in conveying the unselfconscious awkwardness of a pre-teenage boy. Together the siblings lark around and squabble convincingly. Martin-Brandis directs them with great imagination. What could be twee or repetitive is here vividly playful. Beneath the superficial tensions between them, the children are instinctively protective of one another when the dangers of the outside world threaten them. Particularly moving is their duet, Evening Prayer.
Alex Pratley is great as the defeated father, taking hopeless nips from his hip flask to keep him going. Grace Lovelace is absolutely superb as the uptight mother and later as the cunning witch. The design of the show is mid-twentieth-century America, so as Mother she wears a nipped-in waist and heels to do the housework and as the witch, she has a similar outfit now in outrageous pink satin. She’s dangerously seductive. There’s a great visual joke about Mother’s dependence on her little helpers, constantly necking pills from a container. As the situation worsens, she can’t hide her dependence: ever larger pill-shaped pieces of foam rubber poke out of her apron pocket, the final one the size of a calzone. And there’s a nice moment where we see the effect on the children trying to mirror their parents, consuming pills and alcohol.
Opera Kipling makes imaginative use of a small stage. Here, four patterned blinds are turned round to reveal an enticing vision of a sweet shop, gateway to the gingerbread house. Coat stands become trees in the forest, umbrellas their canopy of leaves. The Puck-like figures of the Dew Fairy and the Sandman, played gracefully by Isolde Roxby, create magic with simple means, lighting tiny lights and scattering feathery slips of paper as dew: an image of their protective power.
Giannis Giannopoulos does a magnificent turn at the keyboard which stands in for a whole orchestra.
Runs until 25 August 2024
Camden Fringe runs until 25 August 2024
Truly scrumptious!
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