(Photo credit: Cassandra Hannagan)

How many people on first learning about Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” have thought, “Why would anyone have inserted masques between the Acts of Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream?’ Did someone think it would improve on Shakespeare?” Some writers have conceded that “Fairy Queen” is mostly, or only, worth staging these days because of Henry Purcell’s music, rather than the libretto of Thomas Betterton.

Yet Pinchgut Opera’s new production, which opened on June 7 at the Roslyn Packer Theatre in Walsh Bay succeeded in making this work a delightful – and delightfully thought-provoking – evening in the theater. Director/designer Netia Jones’s solution was actually to cut Shakespeare’s play entirely and then do a magnificent job of finding a through-line which created a sensible plot out of Purcell and Betterton’s triviality, or, at least, a focused meditation on themes, avoiding the somewhat frivolous absurdities of the 1692 original.

Firstly, the theatrical viability of this production was asserted by being performed in the Roslyn Packer Theatre. Until recently, Pinchgut Opera has performed in the Angel Place recital hall, which may be suitable for baroque opera in terms of size, but smacks of the constraints of a concert venue. Has this new venue too dry an acoustic? Yet, a podcast on the Pinchgut company website featuring musical director, Erin Helyard acknowledged that the dry drama-theater acoustic may actually suit the baroque style. Besides, those audience-members who love seeing the accompanying players could still see the fingerboards of the baroque instruments peeping up and conductor Helyard at his continuo. At Roslyn Packer Theatre they were not submerged in a deep opera house pit.

It’s hard to imagine that a modern audience would be desperate to retain Purcell’s original plots, with, for example, a drunken poet coming upon a band of fairies, or a parade of entities like Night, Mystery, Summer, Autumn, and none, it seems, in service of Shakespeare’s deeper meanings. Netia Jones came up with a fantastic “snapshot in time and place” which explored a theme of contemporary relationships over a period of 24 hours (clock time appeared as a back-projection). The equivalent of Purcell’s Act one for example began with “a couple leaving the town”. Soprano Cathy-Di Zhang and bass-baritone Nicholas Dinopoulos were newlyweds arriving at the airport and the airport is so recognizable to us.

It was a revelation to see the choreography that Shannon Burns was able to create with items so familiar to us these days as retractable belt barriers. In fact, it probably wasn’t until this production that I realized there is even a modern-day choreography in the way gate staff use their hands in a summoning gesture to call for boarding passes. There were other delights – for example, in the wedding finale of Jones’s “12 pm” (a choreography with folding outdoor-event chairs) or the set for “6pm: Park Life,” a back projection depicting the lush forest enclosing birdwatchers that was the aural analogue of beautiful birdlike warbling by recorder players Adam Masters and Kailen Cresp.

Night fell in the equivalent of Purcell’s Act two with all its attendant loneliness. The scene shifted to a bar. Soprano Morgan Balfour’s delivery of “See, even Night her self is here…” plumbed the emotional quality in Purcell’s writing, her voice covered, touchingly, for “Let soft Repose Her Eye-lids close…” In her hospital scrubs, we could imagine Balfour as a healthcare worker trying to wrench herself home at the end of an exhausting day. Thus, something heart-rending in her gesture of reaching again for the bottle in the ritornellos. As part of the night-time mood, was the bride, Cathy-Di Zhang, now rejected? Or did she have cold feet? I don’t think we were meant to follow the plot too literally because we’d already seen the newly-weds turn up at the airport. Nevertheless, there was great poetry in the production’s ‘descent’ into night-time atmosphere. The mood was powerful.

And then there was further acknowledgement of night-time life as the scene shifted at “4 am” to a night-time radio station where the dated humor of Purcell’s Coridon and Mapso segment became night-time entertainment, a comic highlight of this up-to-date production. Bass Anthony Mackey and tenor Kanen Breen were an hilarious double act.

Is it possible that this production’s superb matching of images and music distracted from Purcell’s score? There were arresting musical moments. The duetting birdsong has been mentioned above, but the ensemble at the end of Act one when the Drunken Poet (bass-baritone Andrew O’Connor) has been prevented from boarding the plane, “Let him Sleep”, was particularly affecting. The intensity of Helyard’s direction was very apparent in the arresting (you could almost say breathtaking) pauses in the later lines “Softly, softly steal from hence. No noise disturb her sleeping sense” (Considered apart from the dramaturgy the words of the libretto are quite touching). I also found myself looking down to find out who was playing the baroque guitars – Simon Martyn-Ellis, and George Wills.

Might it still be possible to wish that Purcell had written a straight setting of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream?” Yet Jones’s realization of the existing music of “The Fairy Queen,” as a modern-day exploration of relationships, was its own charming insight into the vicissitudes of love. Would it be going too far to say that it was its own tribute to the Helena-Demetrius-Hermia-Lysander musical chairs of Shakespeare’s dream play? At any rate, it’s a pity that this production only had five performances. It deserves a lot of appreciation.