A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Aldeburgh Festival, review: There may be fairies aplenty here, but there’s little enchantment

Netia Jones’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is beautifully staged but the production lacks any emotional depth

Sophie Bevan as Tytania with a chorus of fairies in ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’ at Aldeburgh Festival

There was a real opportunity for Netia Jones’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to do for the digital age what Peter Hall’s iconic Glyndebourne production did for the analogue era. Jones’s signature video projections and animations should have been a natural fit for this material, but the magic of Shakespeare’s story and Benjamin Britten’s music is elusive; shine too bright a light on it and its shadowy spirits vanish. There may be fairies aplenty here, but there’s little enchantment.

What there is in abundance is beauty – stage pictures that make you want to hit pause and just gaze, but they tell us little about the human emotions that animate them. Where is the anger, the jealousy, the anything between Iestyn Davies’s Andy Warhol-like Oberon and Sophie Bevan’s Tytania? Where is the urgency of the young lovers, the collegiate politicking of the Mechanicals?

Musically things are better, though hampered by an acoustic that obscures most of the text (that essential currency of comedy). Davies sings a seductive “I know a bank”, Matthew Rose makes a deliciously larger-than-life Bottom, and it’s hard to imagine the quartet of lovers bettered.

Perhaps responding to what he sees on stage, Ryan Wigglesworth conducts an account of the score that finds its sweetness, but not its salty subversion, its discomfiting, alien quality. The evening passes pleasantly enough – there’s a sweet dog, and a bit with a bicycle – but this Dream is one that’s quickly forgotten.