The Fairy Queen, Queen Elizabeth Hall

Something of a bad boy in the Baroque world, Philip Pickett can generally be relied on to provoke discussion. Whether it’s by teaming up with one of Rolling Stone magazine’s Greatest Guitarists of All Time, or restaging Purcell’s The Fairy Queen with tumblers, jugglers and an excess of hand luggage, there’s always an angle. While collaborators, contexts and repertoire may change, what you can generally set your watch by is the quality of the musicianship – which made last night’s concert all the more of a puzzle.

The Fairy Queen is something of an awkward work. Classed generally as a semi-opera or masque, Purcell’s music provides symbolic interludes within an anonymous adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The anonymous texts are simple and laden with the imagery of nature and the seasons, lacking any sort of connecting narrative. The problem arises therefore of how to stage a work that features some of Purcell’s loveliest music but offers no coherent drama.

The answer, according to Pickett (pictured below) and director Mauricio Garcia Lozano, is to reconceive the work altogether, substituting Purcell’s stock figures (Juno, Phoebus, Summer, Sleep) for more contemporary equivalents, giving us The Career Girl, The Biker, The Bank Clerk and so on. Straggling onto stage from all sides of the auditorium like an ill-assorted group of refugees, punctuating the string bustle of the Prelude with the clatter and thump of suitcases, our singers assemble to await their departure for Arcadia. Joined by circus folk, whose skills are gradually revealed, it is the dynamics of the group that will provide the new narrative.

It’s a clever enough idea, but one that still felt at the workshop stage last night. No changes have been made to the libretto, leaving an unexplained chasm between all the talk of dancing, singing and “tripping it” and the action taking place. While each new character has an exhaustive biography in the programme – “Intelligent, perceptive and deeply emotional, José has been mute since birth” –  to rely upon your audience both buying one and then reading it before the show in order to understand the action is optimistic at best.

There’s also the not-inconsequential issue of noise. With its wooden stage, the Queen Elizabeth Hall offers a resonant recital venue, but when faced with an onslaught of gymnastic tumbling and the constant rearranging of 15 suitcases, the effect is overpowering. Although situated onstage, the soft tones of the New London Consort were frequently lost, too often left providing backing music for scene changes and general dramatic faff. With only single strings, the texture was uncharacteristically thin, exposing ongoing issues of tuning and ensemble. The opening Prelude that should unfold a tapestry for the audience was both rushed and rather ragged, and set the tone for the disagreements to come between soloists and band. There was however some deliciously cheeky continuo playing from David Roblou, which almost redeemed matters.

With so much going on visually, singers were forced to compete for audience attention. Joanne Lunn (as The Career Girl aka Night, Juno, Plaint) set the curve, matching her expressive and impeccably controlled singing with real dramatic conviction. Ed Lyon (The Idler) provided a similarly stylish performance, showcasing his musicality in beautifully even tone. The rest of the performances were rather more mixed, ranging from the rather ugly (Simon Grant’s Bank Clerk was rustic indeed) to competent but slightly uneven singing from Dana Marbach and Faye Newton.

Without wishing to be cast as a grumpy reactionary longing for floaty Grecian draperies and plenty of leafy bowers, I do feel that this new staging fails to offer a better alternative. Surely the point of masque is the coming together of music, text and dance, of blending these elements together into a single mythic and symbolic whole. While displays of physical virtuosity such as Kaveh Rahnama and Lauren Hendry provided are dazzling and impressive, their relationship to the music and action remained unclear. The result left the audience too often being pulled in different directions, constantly overstimulated without ever feeling satisfied.

If you’re going to do iconoclasm you’d better make sure that your grasp of the fundamentals is beyond reproach. With stylish playing and a much slicker sense of ensemble this staging could still work. As it is however, there’s more of novelty and gimmick here than real innovation.

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