Hänsel and Gretel in Rotherham? Glyndebourne's tour of Laurent Pelly's production doesn't travel quite that far north, but if it did, Pelly and Jamie Oliver would have plenty to talk about.
Revived for touring by Stéphane Marlot, Pelly's staging transposes Humperdinck's fairytale opera into a world where cardboard-box-dwelling children are lured away by a witch whose house looks like a nightmarish branch of Lidl, stacked with enough Day-Glo E-numbers to make a sloth hyperactive. But we barely get to see any food - it's all packaging.
As social commentary goes, it is pretty blunt, and it is made no sharper by the jolly rhyming couplets of the surtitle translation. Yet it works, and the emphasis is on the fun. Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke is enjoyably over the top as the Witch, first glimpsed as a shadow projection trying to kick-start various floor-cleaning implements. If only he wore the fuschia suit, pearls and bouffant wig for longer - he is much funnier that way than he is in slobby deshabillé, and scarier, too.
Under Robin Ticciati, the GOT orchestra makes the gorgeous score sound velvety and substantial. The grubby-kneed leads are uncommonly convincing: Bernarda Bobro sounds appealingly girlish as Gretel, while watching Elizabeth DeShong as her awkward little brother is like hearing Wee Jimmy Krankie speak with Joanna Lumley's voice. An American in her UK debut, DeShong's gleaming mezzo makes her one to watch.
