“Man is an abomination of Nature who has turned his back on Mother Earth,” the witch Ježibaba tells the heroine in Dvořák’s Rusalka. In the context of her fury at the Prince’s rejection of the water nymph who has vainly sought to join humanity to experience love, she is, of course, overstating her case. But concern over man’s violation of the natural world lurks within Dvořák’s sad, beautiful fable, and hovers behind Jack Furness’s new production for Garsington Opera, which will also be seen in Edinburgh later this summer.
Avoiding fashionable post-Freudian glosses, Furness keeps us more or less within the bounds of fairytale, imbuing the opera with a genuine, if slightly sinister magic. Tom Piper’s set is dominated by a vast platform that rears upwards to reveal the watery world – and an onstage pond – below, where Musa Ngqungwana’s Vodník looks anxiously on as Natalya Romaniw’s Rusalka pines for Gerard Schneider’s Prince. The creatures in the forest above are played by whirling aerialists and acrobats, whose routines are spectacular but prove distracting, while Christine Rice’s Ježibaba, looking like some malign fin de siècle empress, casts her spells in a hut made from a massive skull.
