★★★★ Recent revivals have turned this fairytale into an allegory, but this spirited show allows its cast’s acting and voices to shine 🖋️ michaelwchurch1
is full of surprises. The story was originally a German folk tale of starving children who get lost in a forest, become prisoners of a cannibalistic witch, and are miraculously saved by a benign host of heavenly creatures.
Humperdinck took an interest in it when his sister turned it into a play for her children to perform. After his opera’s premiere in 1893 it became a worldwide hit, and within 20 years it had been translated into 20 languages.’s Anna Picard explains in her excellent programme note to this production, the story itself became meat and drink to novelists, poets, filmmakers, and psychologists galore.
Children may love it, and it’s often thought of as a children’s opera, but it is emphatically not that. For Freudians it’s a rumination on primeval childhood fears of separation from parents, of blindness, and death. In the traditional version, the impoverished and desperate mother plans to kill her offspring by leaving them to die in the forest, but Humperdinck’s gentler solution is to concentrate the evil in a witch who can be transformed into a cake and eaten. A recent
version turned the work into an ecology lesson, with dirty plastic bags blowing through a forest of denuded trees, and with the children’s hunger made to symbolise the misery of those starving in the developing world.
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