“Darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.” Who wouldn’t want to pass that line off as their own? Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43, full of shadows, sleep and dreams, has an affinity with his A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which human mystery speaks more powerfully than sweet fairy magic. When Benjamin Britten made the play into an opera in 1960 for the reopening of Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall, he and his partner, Peter Pears, chopped and reordered the text but introduced only six words (apparently) that were not Shakespeare’s own. Directors have mined the opera’s hints of eroticism and deviance, setting it in ink-splattered schoolroom, country house nursery and Cabaret-style Berlin with Thisbe memorably twirling her nipple tassels.
Garsington’s new staging, conducted by Douglas Boyd and directed and designed by Netia Jones, has returned it to a wood. It revels in the darkly bright. Boyd and the Philharmonia Orchestra, playing superbly, kept the pace swift and flowing; it was hard to imagine that this work can, usually does, sag. (Oh no, the rude mechanicals. Oh no, the lost lovers. But no oh-no-ing here.) The sinister clatterings of harpsichord or xylophone, the glissando swoops of double bass and two harps, the lurching solo trombone: all always ear-catching, were especially vivid.
