Longborough's Artistic Director Polly Graham explores her approach to directing our 2023 production of Purcell's The Fairy Queen.
Purcell's The Fairy Queen is part of our 2023 festival (performances 29 July - 3 August 2023). Find out more and book online >
The Fairy Queen is Purcell’s response to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – what was then a little known play, quite out of fashion and unpopular for the time. Purcell and his anonymous librettist reworked the play to create a ‘Restoration Spectacular’ – a large scale, fabulous show.
The Fairy Queen is probably the most famous example we have of this kind of Restoration music theatre, where the text, rather than the music, leads the action, but the music offers elaborate masques, which reflect and respond to the atmosphere of the play.
Rather than propel any action forward, these musical sections open up an even wider perspective on the story and its associated moods, and introduce additional characters.
The abandoned Spreekpark amusement park in Berlin - cr Jan Bommes via Flickr
There’s a symphony for the entrance of swans, scenes relating to the latest fashion in interior design, fairy dances, hornpipes, a squabble between two rustics and a joyful dance for haymakers, and mini-song cycles which draw our attention to the patterns in nature – for example, the change from day to night, the cycle of the seasons, and a hymn to the Sun as a source of life. It is vibrant entertainment and invites spectacle.
In approaching this piece, we wanted to do three things: return to Shakespeare’s original text, explore ways we could weave the music through the action, and work with musicians as theatrical performers.
Banksy's 'bemusement park' Dismaland, in Weston-super-Mare in 2015 - cr by Byrion Smith via Flickr
Working with Shakespeare’s original text takes the piece a step away from the presentational world of Restoration theatre and brings us closer to the spirit of Elizabethan theatre-making, where the audience’s imagination was a critical part of the performance. Shakespeare’s poetry and the imagination of the audience transformed the bare boards of an Elizabethan playhouse into grand cities and magical forests.
Of course, the wood also is a metaphor for a subconscious space where characters confront images of nature and their own desires. It’s a peripheral, liminal space, where crazy things can happen. It’s the disruptive, uncurated natural world. I was inspired by Richard Mabey’s wonderful book The Unofficial Countryside, which focuses on the persistent and indomitable forces of nature, and notices mini wildernesses that spring up on the edges of towns and cities, by the side of railway tracks, or through the cracks in the pavement. Nature that persists in spite of our destruction.
The magic wood is a space where the depths of desire are plumbed. We have drawn on images of abandoned theme parks (which contain their own self-consciously theatrical aesthetic) and sourced objects of gratification to populate the stage. It is interesting to consider how they also relate back to the world of spectacular entertainment that was so central to Purcell’s project.
Nate Gibson's set design for Longborough's The Fairy Queen
Going back to Shakespeare also creates a useful tension, between the original play and the musical masques. This opposition is something we wanted to explore. How could we blur the boundaries between instrumentalists and singers, pit and stage, and what magic could we activate through the collision of these two worlds? How might this process feed into the other oppositions, or transformations so key to the story? Shifts from day to night, from city to wild woodland, from child to parent, from human to animal, individual to global.
So much of The Fairy Queen score is about music, announcing itself with a recognisable dance rhythm, or a song with an invitation (or injunction) to sing or to listen. Purcell equates magic with the mysterious forces of nature, but I believe we can find a theatrical vocabulary for magic through the act of music making too. Naomi Burrell and Harry Sever’s new musical arrangement for this production has been conceived with the idea of blurring the lines between baroque and folk music, opening up the virtuosic and the primal impulses inherent within the score. In the woodland of the subconscious, the musicians on stage can become the life force of the forest, and take part in the nightlong rave of the fairies.
Opera and theatre director Polly Graham is Artistic Director of Longborough Festival Opera, Founder and Artistic Director of Loud Crowd, and directs Longborough’s 2023 production of The Fairy Queen.
