⭐️⭐️⭐️

'If we shadows have offended…' This isn't Netia Jones’ first encounter with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Her 2017 Aldeburgh Festival staging of Britten’s Shakespearean opera dappled the stage with so much video that the singers’ faces were barely visible much of the time. That lesson has clearly been learnt in her new production at Garsington, already seen at Santa Fe three summers ago. But does Puck’s line in the epilogue “and all is mended” ring true of her staging? Not entirely.

Things are pretty black and white in Jones’ Athenian wood. Her white set – graced by a piano (why?) and an oak tree – is populated by fairies in black costumes. Iestyn Davies’ angry Oberon, smashing his whisky tumbler, occasionally sports a black wolf mask, while Lucy Crowe’s bleach-blonde Tytania wears a white gown beneath a long black cloak with an enormous train. They mirror Nicholas Crawley’s drunken Theseus and Christine Rice’s haughty Hippolyta, all in white, manoeuvring on a checkerboard in Act 3. The children of the Garsington Opera Youth Company wear beetle-black hats, wings or antennae, popping up randomly through Whack-a-Mole holes. Only Jerone Marsh-Reid’s larky Puck, among the fairies, is permitted any colour, donned in impish green. Telescopes, astronomical rings and a celestial map accompany Britten’s queasy glissandos and other-worldly percussion – music of the spheres indeed.

Lucy Crowe (Tytania) and Richard Burkhead (Bottom) | Photo credit: Craig Fuller

Jones does solve the problem of nocturnal scenes playing against bright natural daylight in Garsington’s perspex-sided opera pavilion. For Act 2, black drapes all but shroud the panels, allowing the midsummer night’s shenanigans to play out without too much daylight interfering. These darkened panels, and a huge black disc, allow Jones to indulge in her beloved video projections – spiders, webs, ink blots, ferns – with occasional colour mottling the stage to depict a forest canopy without masking the singers.

Those singers were mostly excellent. Davies is an experienced Oberon and he commanded the stage with his laser-like countertenor, projecting text with precision. Crowe sang an outstanding Tytania, top notes icily clear, very much suiting the portrayal.

The four lovers – in pastel shaded schoolwear, along with satchels, increasingly plastered in dirt as the evening wore on – were all sympathetically sung. With a mezzo darkening to contralto depths, Stephanie Wake-Edwards was an impressive Hermia, sparking against Camilla Harris’ bright soprano Helena. Caspar Singh and James Newby both displayed fine voices as Lysander and Demetrius and the lovers’ spat in Act 2 was well choreographed.

Iestyn Davies (Oberon) and Lucy Crowe (Tytania) | Photo credit: Craig Fuller

Garsington regular Richard Burkhard sang Bottom with a sonorous baritone, although he and his fellow Mechanicals weren’t permitted many laughs by Jones. Any humour in their woodland rehearsals felt laboured – the trampoline failed to provide any comic bounce – and the Pyramus and Thisby play-within-a-play felt more tedious than brief, missing the usual open goal gags, although John Savournin’s Quince whipping out his ukelele to help tune Flute’s pitch problems was amusing. The latter role was well sung by James Way, repeating his fine Flute seen at Glyndebourne last summer.

Douglas Boyd and the Philharmonia are a class act, and he drew terrific, detailed playing from them, revelling in the sinister unease of Britten’s score. The menace in the double basses just before Bottom is awoken from his 'dream' was truly unsettling and principal flute Samuel Coles offered a fine Donizettian accompaniment to Way’s Thisby solo.

Act 1 played with an open-backed stage – part of the Santa Fe set-up – to reveal the natural world beyond, birdsong a welcome addition to Britten’s score. But that was about the limit to any magic on display in Jones’ production. For real magic, the fire pits and flickering candles lining the mown pathways back to the picnic tents had to suffice.

Until 29 July | More info available here