If you thought dead parrots began with Python – think again. Offenbach’s 1869 opera opens on a convent school garden where Vert Vert makes his solemn entrance – a very dead parrot hanging limp in his cage-bier followed by a cortege of weeping girls. (Except that these are very much mock-solemnities, just as later there are mock-heroics: near-but-never-quite bathos is the name of this game.) The parrot’s death means that the position of chief school pet is vacant. Enter, in his lurid green tailcoat and hat, the young and inexperienced Valentin – very green in every sense of the word.
This is the springboard for a totally implausible series of events featuring dragoons, separated lovers and garden trysts, fleeing lovers rooted to the spot, tavern scenes, crusader knight and wimpled ladies, girl soldier following her beloved and the young hero setting sail for new experiences. Sound familiar? They should, and regular opera-goers will enjoy identifying tropes and sources. There is a sense too of further lost shades of comic meaning for Offenbach and his set, as when a self-dramatising tenor loses his voice after a prosaic dousing in the canal.
Offenbach’s plot-pastiche gives the cast and orchestra, conducted by David Parry, opportunities to range over contrasting performance styles in quick succession with considerable panache. Acts 1 and 2 are remarkably inventive but set up a scenario that is hard to resolve; however, in this production the cast worked all the harder to ensure a series of set pieces of varying scale in the final act keep it moving to its predictable conclusion as dragoons are paired off with convent girls and four sets of lovers are reunited in the garden.
The ‘heroine’ Mimi (Fflur Wynn) was outstanding and there were some remarkable character performances, notably from Geoffrey Dolton, the school’s dancing master, who sustains an extended song-and-dance solo illustrating in his convent school class the history of dance from pavane to waltz. Quick changes of mood and step from soaring intense melodic line to brisk or delicate rhythmic pieces characterised the work as a whole. This performance was the UK premiere and it featured a new translation by David Parry which brought out Offenbach’s subtle or less-subtle puncturing of the conventions he is parading.
The set featured a diminutive chateau-style building and garden which transformed readily to an inn and the convent interior. A new feature of Garsington Opera this year is the way in which the back wall of the stage opens to reveal the real woodland landscape behind, integrating it into the stage set and put to good use this year with the barge which emerges from the woodland and circles the stage - echoes of Wagner’s Swan Knight but here taking Vert Vert on his heroic adventures down the canal to visit his aunt.
Garsington Opera’s setting is idyllic, in a quintessentially English wooded landscape next to the Getty country house on the Wormsley Estate south of Oxford. The long interval gives ample opportunity to enjoy the surroundings, and dine or picnic in style by the lake or in a series of mini-pavilions. This is an ideal antidote to urban opera house performances. Next year Garsington promise a joint venture with the RSC in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; this development is one to watch and should enable a wider range of people to access their remarkable performances.