Purcell - The Fairy Queen
‘Love Shall Fill All the Places of Care’: Notes from the Director
‘Lovers and Madmen have such seething Brains,
Such shaping Phantasies, that apprehend
More than cool Reason ever comprehends.’
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene 1
Purcell’s The Fairy Queen is a musical fantasy based on the ideas and characters in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The score is full of stage directions such as ‘In the distance swans are seen swimming under the bridge of the left-hand river’ or ‘twelve oaks form an avenue’. The scene is expected to change every minute. Added to this, the masques that make up the opera were designed to be performed in between the acts of the play. All in all, an immensely long and expensive evening.
Nowadays we are happy to hear the music on its own. Indeed, it is so extraordinarily vivid and powerful that it ranks alongside some of the greatest operatic music ever written. But there are problems that have to be overcome. With no story that makes narrative sense, a world must be created where the wide variety of events that are suggested in the opera are possible, and the whole can flow, if not logically, then with some theatrical integrity. A visual framework must be found that lets the music speak.
Half way between our own time and that of Purcell there was another man who expended his creative energies fantasising on the world of Shakespeare and of Midsummer Night’s Dream. The painter Richard Dadd is known for the arresting Shakespearian fantasies he produced in the latter part of his life. Having exhibited as a member of the Victorian fairy school of painters, his career took an unexpected change when he was committed to mental institutions after killing his father in 1843. But while in Bedlam, encouraged by an enlightened doctor to paint as much as he liked, and no longer subject to commercial demands, he developed a unique style. Paintings such as ‘The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke’ (now in the Tate) and ‘Contradiction: Oberon and Titania’ are from this period. Dense and intricate, at times thickly overlaid with detail, at others simple and pure, but always fantastical and imaginative, they describe a world for the eyes that mirrors the one Purcell created for the ears.
Our production brings Purcell’s music and Richard Dadd together in an unhinged world. Fed fat on Shakespearian fantasies, it is inhabited by earthy Bottom characters, mischievous Pucks, ethereal fairies, fellow mental patients, benign doctors, and figures from Dadd’s paintings, such as the transvestite Crazy Jane. Dadd and Purcell invite us to leave behind our rational preconceptions and enter a world of imagination and childish wonder. A devotee of Egyptian religions, Dadd worshipped the god of the sun, mirroring Purcell’s Hail Great Parent music. Finally, Hymen descends to unite the disparate elements in the great marriage scene. For Dadd, the marriage represents an attempt to bring peace and resolution to his fevered mental state. He yearns for wholeness, for a marriage of the paradoxes of his personality, and of life itself. The symbolism of such a marriage is represented in our production by puppets, echoing the symbolism of Purcell’s Chinese Man and Woman, and based on faces found in one of Dadd’s paintings, ‘Bacchanalian Scene’. These puppets are presented to Dadd in the birthday scene in Act II.
Dadd and The Fairy Queen represent the need for marriage within us all, whether we are actually married at all, or even inclined to it. The marriage in The Fairy Queen is a union not between characters we have come to know and feel for, as it is in Midsummer Night’s Dream, but at a deeper level a marriage of mind and heart, of heaven and earth, fairy and mortal, lost and found, inward feeling and the outward expression of that feeling. It concerns us all because we are in a relationship with ourselves as well as with the world around us. It is a marriage that none of us can escape.
Scenes
ACT 1
• Scene 1: Bedlam
• Scene 2: Night
• Scene 3: Fairies
ACT 2
• Scene 1: Loss
• Scene 2: Birthday
• Scene 3: Marriage and Reconciliation