Review: HANSEL AND GRETEL, Royal Ballet and Opera

At Christmas, there’s always a newspaper article or two that tries to explain the public’s fondness for ghost stories, from A Christmas Carol to, well, Ghostbusters on telly yet again. Less examined is the no less ubiquitous penchant for a fairytale, from pantos by the coachload to bedtime picture books in the stocking to stage adaptations and even operas. There they are, handily out of copyright. 

There’s room for at least two Hansel and Gretels in London this winter - a somewhat anodyne stage version back for a second season at Shakespeare’s Globe and the magnificently macabre Englebert Humperdinck classic at the Royal Ballet and Opera. 

As ever with fairytales, the psychology is fascinating. The Brothers Grimm collected their stories in the 19th century, but the roots of their enduringly popular folktales are lost in the mists of time, passed from generation to generation, each teller adding a little here, subtracting a little there until a distillation of universal hopes and fears emerges from all those fireplace chats. That this work’s libretto, capturing the fate of the siblings sent into the forest who require all their wits to escape a cannibalistic witch, was written by Humperdinck’s own sister, Adelheid Wette, is almost too good to be true! Pick the bones out of that!

Director-designer, Antony McDonald, creates a world on stage that is an insistently heightened reality, something recognisable, but othered enough to need no ‘Do Not Try This At Home’ notices. It’s that distance that gives permission for the transgressions to come - not the only callback to another dark fairytale of more modern provenance, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, the two stories sharing many themes.

Atavistic human needs often ground fairytales and this one is no different. In a Tyrolean cottage, times have turned hard, the boisterous Hansel (Kate Lindsey in a trouser role) and Gretel (Heidi Stober) all but singing “Food Glorious Food”, as they long for something to eat. Somehow a milk jug is upturned while the kids are dancing and their mother (Catherine Carby) casts them out into the forbidding woods to hunt for berries. Their father (Thomas Lehman), boozed up after selling his entire stock of brooms, warns against the Witch who lives in the deepest darkest clearing and the parents, not entirely singlemindedly, go after their offspring.

And, sure enough, looking like a pantomime dame at first, the Witch (a tremendous turn from Carole Wilson) does capture them in her candy house with a view to eating them, Hansel fattened up like a foie gras goose. No spoilers, but you can guess the fate of the three and it’s such a lot of guilty fun getting there.

All of which gives the impression that this production sits halfway between a pantomime and a musical (Into The Woods, probably, especially in a glorious pre-interval parade of characters from Grimm’s greatest hits). But there is no shortchanging the operatic element at all! 

Making her Covent Garden debut, Giedrė Šlekytė delivers a score full of accessible tunes with the pep that children’s theatre demands. Sure you get the influence of Wagner, but soon some Italian lightness takes us up and away from the Teutonic torments. This work is often billed as a fine taster for the wider repertory and it certainly is - and not just for children. 

The sets get more and more spectacular so, even before they sing, Lindsey and Stober have quite a job on their hands not to be lost in a trifecta of music, spectacle and space. They don’t, brilliantly capturing childish chutzpah and childish irresponsibility, but never less than compelling presences, helped by voices both complementary pleasing and individually crystal clear. The style is as much musical theatre as opera (no seven minutes standing to one side to sing an aria that tells us pretty much what we know), but there is no compromise on the aesthetics of the form. Surtitles are welcome, but I’ve never known them less required.

Roll in a glorious chorus of rescued children and, if your pockets are deep enough (a charge that can be levelled at most shows in the West End to be fair) you’ll get a magical, malevolent, majestic show, opera’s counterpoint to The Nutcracker. And recommendations can hardly come higher than that.   

Hansel and Gretel is at the Royal Ballet and Opera until 9 January 2025

Photo images: Tristram Kenton

 

 

 

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