



The six Rustics, instead of injecting some earthy, comic relief, were thoroughly folded in to the repressive atmosphere – the spliff that Bottom and Tytania share released something but it sure wasn’t magic, and the "Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe" (the play within a play) was delivered with a basic, crude fury – Moonshine moons; a drunken Wall (as played by Snout) pisses against, well, a wall and is then sick – that produced only a few short-lived laughs. The usually extravagant Willard White was severely reined-in as Bottom, sonorously sung and finely acted, and graphically the object of dark, rough desire; Jonathan Veira’s impressive Quince was about the only part that could have been moved to a more conventional staging; Michael Colvin used his fine tenor to great effect as Flute, even better as an outrageous Thisbe; and Alden prepared the ground for Graeme Danby’s thick, sports-coach Snug’s rape of Thisbe during the play. Leo Hussain conducted and the orchestra played Britten’s score with a clear, incisive idea of just how sinister and dark this music can be, of how dangerous an area the subconscious really is, where life really happens. Britten’s “Dream” is sometimes seen as a one-off among his operas, simply because it isn’t, or so we thought, driven by the theme of corruption of innocence that obsessed the composer. Well, Alden has certainly addressed that head-on, and given it a darkness that continues right through to a very non-benign conclusion. It manages to be both compelling and joyless. Quite an achievement.