The treasure that is Hampshire’s Grange Festival

English Summer opera works brilliantly. You simply get a train to the nearest station, followed by a local taxi. Or if you want to drive yourself, there is plenty of free parking. You either take a picnic or book into the dining facilities they provide. Smart dress is required, but other than that it’s completely unpretentious. The only exception is Glyndebourne which rightly considers itself a cut above the rest and, like the Royal Opera, engages directors who want to show other directors how clever they are. The idea is to create a completely new staging to render the opera in an unexpectedly distorted light. For example Glyndebourne’s Parsifal this year was brilliant musically, but treated the whole story as if it were the drama of a dysfunctional family. Which it isn’t. 

Not so the Grange Festival in Hampshire, I’m pleased to say. Easily accessible from London via the M3, they have put on three operas and other entertainments. The operas are from the 18th century, and the mid and later 19th: Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes , Verdi’s La Traviata , and Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus , more properly an operetta rather than an opera. 

Die Fledermaus (“The Bat”) was huge fun, with a plot based on an 1872 vaudeville play by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, who had provided several successful libretti for Offenbach. The action involves a newly married couple Rosalinde (Sylvia Schwarz) and Gabriel von Eisenstein (Andrew Hamilton), plus Rosalinde’s clever maid Adele (Ellie Laugharne), who is scheming to attend a ball given by the eccentric Prince Orlofsky (Claudia Huckle). He/she appears in disguise (as a Russian actress), and so does Eisenstein, having been allowed to avoid prison for his first night before serving a few days detention after striking a policeman. He and the complicit prison governor (Darren Jeffery) are disguised as French noblemen, creating huge confusion with their franglais. 

At the ball itself, Eisenstein is unaware he is flirting with his own wife, but she cleverly steals his pocket watch as proof of his infidelity, and in the end, Dr Falke (Ben McAteer), the orchestrator of this New Year’s Eve prank, devised as payback for an old humiliation, reveals all. (The title of Die Fledermaus, incidentally, derives from the bat costume with which Eisenstein has exposed Dr Falke to ridicule.)

In the meantime we were all hugely entertained by the shenanigans on stage, including the witty repartee of Frosch the Gaoler, a speaking role amply filled by the actress Myra Dubois. Of course Fledermaus is originally in German, and contains lots of spoken dialogue. 

Rather than consign this to surtitles, the sensible way of accommodating it is by creating an English version. This naturally has to reflect modern concerns so that the jokes are comprehensible to the audience, and John Mortimer did a superb job with the libretto. So did director Paul Curran with the staging (designs by Gary McCann), all under the excellent baton of Paul Daniel with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

Sadly this was the last performance of Fledermaus , but the Grange Festival in Hampshire has a great deal to offer, including Ballet Black, seen at the Royal Opera and Ballet in London. The will also be hosting The Music of Queen at the Opera, a couple of Jazz evenings, and two performances of Bernstein on Broadway played by the Welsh National Opera Orchestra, conducted by Karen Kamensek.

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