The Grange Festival 2025 – Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus – with Andrew Hamilton, Sylvia Schwartz & Ben McAteer; directed by Paul Curran; conducted by Paul Daniel

J Strauss II
Die Fledermaus – Operetta in three Acts to a libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genée [sung to an English version of the libretto by John Mortimer with English surtitles]

Eisenstein – Andrew Hamilton
Rosalinde – Sylvia Schwartz
Adele – Ellie Laugharne
Prince Orlofsky – Claudia Huckle
Dr Falke – Ben McAteer
Frank – Darren Jeffery
Dr Blind – John Graham Hall
Alfred – Trystan Llŷr Griffiths
Frosch – Myra DuBois
Ida – Isabelle Atkinson

The Grange Festival Chorus

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Paul Daniel

Paul Curran – Director
Gary McCann – Designer
Johanna Town – Lighting designer

Paul Curran’s production of Johann Strauss’s operetta Die Fledermaus (1874) – composed in the heyday of Habsburg Vienna – brings the action forwards to the 1920s or early ’30s, bearing with it a great deal of Art Deco style of that period, as well as Cabaret-inspired indulgence and uninhibited sexual excess in the ball scene of Act Two, enabling those themes to be explored more openly and with more contemporary resonances than a more buttoned up 19^th century setting could. As the jailer, Frosch, also remarks with mordant irony to the audience, the setting at that time with the imminent rise of fascism doesn’t have anything to do with today. Politics don’t otherwise obtrude, however, and the fast-paced wordplay of the libretto’s English adaptation by John Mortimer (of Horace Rumpole fame) invokes the spirit of Gilbert and Sullivan, bringing the work back into the era of 19^th century prosperity and complaisance. The production pulls in two different directions, therefore, but in such a way that translates the temper of the original sympathetically to an English audience.

Mortimer’s version, incidentally, has its own cleverness with a very Gilbertian wordplay on various ‘legal tricks’ in the Act One song for the lawyer Dr Blind, and in Act Two the dance sequence is abbreviated with a rendition of the Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka that features the chorus’s eulogising a whole drink’s cabinet worth of alcoholic beverages, neatly developing the bibulous theme of the famous Champagne song. What does feel contrived in this adaptation is having Falke address himself to the audience and explain the plot he is hatching to get his own back on Eisenstein – perhaps a nod to Powell and Pressburger’s fascinating film adaptation Oh… Rosalinda!!, with Anton Walbrook as Falke in post-Second World War Vienna. There are far more complicated operatic plots and so it’s an unnecessary intrusion upon letting the action play out by itself. But it also spoils the surprise of Frosch’s breaking the fourth wall at the opening of Act Three for the traditional improvisation, all the more so as the role is taken here by cabaret drag artist Myra DuBois as Frosch’s widow, now making ends meet and delivering a sequence of waspish putdowns to sections of the audience as well as the cast. (She calls herself an ‘empath’, but empathetic is one thing she certainly isn’t!) 

If the production is a somewhat unorthodox champagne cocktail, then, the musical and stage performances sparkle enticingly. Andrew Hamilton is an affable Eisenstein compared with Ben McAteer’s more comically overbearing Falke, bent on revenge for the trick played on him by Eisenstein. Ellie Laugharne plays the soubrette Adele as a frisky Cockney with quite robust coloratura that perhaps puts Slyvia Schwartz as her easy-going mistress, Rosalinde, somewhat in the musical background.  The latter’s former singing teacher and amorous pursuer, Alfred, is cast as a fruitily ebullient Italian tenor, to which Trystan Llŷr Griffiths is enthusiastically committed with his reverberant snatches of various arias from the operatic repertory, including those of his namesake in La traviata. Claudia Huckle is a moodily androgynous Prince Orlofsky (a character often taken as a trouser role) inciting others at the ball they host to other sexually ambiguous or risqué identities, including Darren Jeffery’s bluff Frank, the prison governor, as a leather fetishist. As the lawyer – who doesn’t appear at the ball – John Graham Hall is suitably straightlaced. 

Paul Daniel and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra also bring charm and sparkle to the performance, maintaining the inimitable schwung of the Waltz King’s music across its various numbers despite the breaks for the spoken dialogue. Amidst the buoyant rhythms is an array of finely-spun melodies from the various solo instrumentalists of the BSO, often adding some deeper emotional content to all the froth with a touch of nostalgia or yearning that looks ahead to Strauss’s successor as the master of Viennese operetta, Lehár. It all makes for an uplifting and rewarding evening’s entertainment.

Further performances to 5 July