One of the charms of Garsington's opera season has always been the relationship between the shows and the manor's formal garden. Directors have regularly used the garden for exits and entrances, and Daniel Slater's new Midsummer Night's Dream follows suit, sometimes magically.
The production seems to take its cue from the "shadows" and visions" in Puck's closing monologue. Within a set of decrepit beds frames and mattresses, Francis O'Connor's designs conjure images that seem to be dredged from a 1950s British childhood. Richard Durden's Puck is a bumbling Mr Pastry-like figure, hardly alert to the orders of James Laing's Oberon in his Ruritanian regalia; Rebecca Bottone's sexy but occasionally shrill Tytania has a retinue of fairies, members of Trinity Boys Choir, who wear grubby military uniforms and scurry around like The Borrowers, while the four lovers appear first in school uniform, tumbling out of a wardrobe as if setting foot in Narnia for the first time.
If it's not always clear what it amounts to dramatically, everything is presented with the lightest of touches so that it hardly matters. For once the mechanicals, a gallery of working-class stereotypes led by Neal Davies's wonderfully judged Bottom, are genuinely funny, and though Slater can do little when the opera's pace flags towards the end of the second act, he manages the quarrels of the lovers – Andrew Staples and Anna Stéphany, George von Bergen and Katherine Manley – adroitly. Steuart Bedford's conducting puts the seal on the evening; refined and never forced, he unfolds Britten's score with exactly the right sense of dream-like rapture.
