Composer: Henry Purcell
Conductor: Seb Gillot
Director: Eloise Lally
The Fairy Queen is a semi-opera composed by Henry Purcell in 1692 and loosely based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. HGO have dropped the spoken interludes from the play and used the music and songs to create their own story about a photographer sucked into the worlds of her imagination.
The result is an overwhelming experience. At almost three hours, it’s very long but it overwhelms in many other ways as well. The layering of the photographer’s story, the allusions to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the director’s influences from Ovid’s Metamorphosis mean that watching The Fairy Queen can be like looking into a kaleidoscope and catching glimpses of many things at once. There are two pairs of lovers, obviously the four Athenians of Shakespeare’s play, but there’s also a Narcissus figure who looks lovingly at his reflection, a series of songs set in a circus and the photographer character lying down to sleep in a position that mirrors Henry Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton. All to a constant stream of music.
The music is played by the HGOAntiqua Orchestra, conducted by Seb Gillot while also playing the harpsichord. As well as a string section, there are more exotic instruments like theorbos – huge oversized lutes, and baroque trumpets. Each scene begins and ends with an instrumental, with eight other songs in between, some are plaintive love ballads, some celebrations of life, others comic, others lustful, declaiming that “one charming night is worth a thousand lucky days.”
If the many layers of allusion mean that a clear storyline is lost, the mood is clear and pervasive. The world the photographer gets lost in is an amoral, decadent world, where sexuality and gender are fluid and life is open to the passionate and curious. As one song puts it, “A thousand ways to spend the hours, no life is as blessed as ours.” This production is sensual, provocative, frequently camp. The costumes are like a grab-bag of sparkly dresses, see-through mesh tops and silky nightwear, which are scattered liberally over the cast of performers.
The cast performs as an ensemble, each getting a chance to shine in a solo but onstage at all times, always with something to do. Eloise Lally does a brilliant job of organising 14 people on stage without it ever seeming like chaos and always providing a whole range of expressions and attitudes to watch. As such, there aren’t any particular main performers, but it’s fun to pick a person and watch their progression for part of the piece. James Holt’s Corydon as a lion tamer has a fun swaggering bravado and Issy Bridgeman’s Juno sings a hymn to marriage with a pleasingly sardonic tone. Betty Makharinsky gives a moving performance in The Plaint but it was Richard Decker who provides the most watchable expressions while not singing.
The original performance of The Fairy Queen was a spectacle, which was so expensive to perform that it couldn’t make its money back even with its success. It included fireworks, elaborate theatrical machinery and a troupe of eight dancing monkeys. Alas, HGO were never going to be able to reproduce that but with a talented cast, a tight orchestra and superb direction they are able to put on a spectacle in praise of love, joy and a little bit of kinky experimentation – which is more than enough to be thankful for.
Runs until 28 April 2024
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It's magic.
