It was appropriate, perhaps, that the City of London Festival should close with the greatest of all works for the stage by a British composer - but instead of the hoped for blaze of glory, the new production of The Fairy Queen by Stuart Hopps and the King's Consort was something of a damp squib.
Tremendous though Purcell's score is, the work itself - a series of masques designed to follow the acts of an awful reworking of A Midsummer Night's Dream - is a dramaturgical nightmare. Jettisoning the dialogue and fleshing characters out of Purcell's largely anonymous soloists is one solution, which worked brilliantly at ENO in 1995. Hopps tries a different method: the singers are mainly consigned to the pit. What we get is a combination of mime and ballet with Purcell's music as accompaniment.
Hopps's overall concept has a brittle, deco quality that sits uneasily with the sexy humaneness of the score. With Max Reinhardt's movie of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the back of his mind, one suspects, Hopps presents us with a 20s film crew on a location shoot in Oberon's wood. The four lovers are tantrum-prone stars with complicated private lives. The frazzled Director, hitting the bottle in frustration, is subsequently transformed into the ass with whom Oberon plays his cruel trick on Titania.
The other problem lies in the fact that Hopps, though a talented choreographer, isn't a great one, and there are times when we get an uncomfortable sense of déjà-vu. Oberon indulges in a great deal of cloak-swirling, like his counterpart in Ashton's The Dream. Puck jetés all over the place as all balletic Pucks are wont to do. There's an exquisite, drooping solo for Titania when she is confronted with her misplaced passion for the transformed Director, though her subsequent pas de deux of reconciliation with Oberon, full of slow arabesques and tricky lifts, tells us nothing about the couple's emotional relationship.
Strangest of all are the Spirits of the Air, whom Titania summons for the Director's entertainment - these prove to be Superman and Marilyn Monroe (in Seven Year Itch garb), who live and gyrate in rock'n'roll style regardless of what is going on in the music.
Mercifully, the score survives. It is conducted with glowing warmth, if a certain sameness of pace, by Robert King and played with a combination of exuberance and tender sensuality by the King's Consort. The choral singing is wonderfully refined - scrupulously phrased and shaped - though it is the soloists who steal the vocal honours with the soprano Susan Gritton, in lustrous voice, spinning out a gorgeous web of silvery sound and Neal Davies having great fun with the Drunken Poet's song.
