Island of Dreams, Grange Park Opera: a quixotic, overly literal take on The Tempest

Composer Anthony Bolton has an admirable go at adapting Shakespeare’s play but fails to add enough to the text

It is a brave composer who takes on setting Shakespeare to music. Even more so if you choose a play that follows in the wake of the most successful new British opera of this century.
By his own account, composer Anthony Bolton was not daunted but inspired by seeing Thomas Adès’s now internationally famous opera The Tempest 20 years ago in 2004, and felt that he could do something “quite different” which “would dwell on the mystical, magical, dreamy atmosphere of Prospero’s island”.
Now the result has come to Grange Park Opera for just two performances, and while the realisation of Bolton’s dream is admirably done, and there are flashes of vivid storytelling in the music, Bolton’s drifting, episodic vision just fails, as have so many Shakespearean operas, to add enough to the text. 
Adès’s librettist Meredith Oakes rewrote the words in rhyming couplets, whereas Bolton made the decision to stick to a cut version of Shakespeare’s own words. The text is set in long, arching lines, underpinned by often imaginative orchestral commentary – Bolton is skilful at using the harp and burbling high wind to support his lines, with touches of brass colour to signal the King of Naples – but the melodies are not memorable, and the harmonic direction of the music is uncertain.
However, no composer could seek a better advocate for his new work than Brett Polegato, who sings the central role of Prospero with powerful projection and complete verbal clarity. He is given a dominating scene in act two as he drowns his book, but earlier – especially in a work called Island of Dreams – his famous meditation that “we are such stuff as dreams are made on” goes for very little. Hugh Cutting’s counter-tenor Ariel has a late showpiece in “Where the bee sucks”, but elsewhere the music that animates the text is shifted into half-heard off-stage choruses, while the noises of which this island is full turn out to be a cheerily familiar accordion tune.
The supporting cast is beyond reproach, with William Dazeley’s King of Naples and his clumsy crew of Henry Grant Kerswell as Sebastian, Philip Clieve as Antonio and Harry Nicoll as Gonzago trailing their suitcases while Adrian Thompson’s jester Trinculo and Richard Stuart as the drunken Stephano bring some jovial colour to the proceedings. By contrast, the love couple of Ferdinand (Luis Gomes) and Miranda (Ffion Edwards) do their best but are very palely characterised, while Andreas Jankowitsch’s Caliban does not have quite enough force. Conducting the Gascoigne Orchestra, George Jackson cues them all with vigour.
There is one interesting success in the show, and that is the concept of David Haneke’s sophisticated video designs on a back screen and two full-length side screens that move around the stage portraying everything from rolling seas to a moving chess game, and a vivid interlude that sends the lovers hurtling through space united in a chrysalis (while saving thousands on building scenery). Within all this, David Pountney directs with his customary professionalism. But I am afraid that, for all the on-stage efforts, this is a dream that soon will fade.
Final performance on July 13; grangeparkopera.co.uk