Garsington’s The Queen of Spades will surely be one of the best things to be seen this summer

United KingdomUnited Kingdom Garsington Opera 2025 [1] – Tchaikovsky, The Queen of Spades: Soloists, Garsington Opera Youth Company, Garsington Opera Chorus, Philharmonia Orchestra / Douglas Boyd (conductor). Garsington Opera at Wormsley, 31.5.2025. (CR)

 

Robert Hayward (Count Tomsky) and Roderick Williams (Prince Yeletsky) © Julian Guidera

Jack Furness’s wonderfully unsettling production of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades for Garsington Opera makes a suggestive play with light and dark that chimes in rhythm with the themes of the drama itself. It might almost have been called The Queen of the Night, given the crepuscular appearance of the dead Countess to Herman when she reveals the supposed secret of the cards to him (which turns out to be a vengeful deception) and the added haunting apparitions of her younger self here, seeing that it is her backstory which gives rise to her knowledge of the winning formula in Pushkin’s scenario.

The dichotomy between light and dark isn’t a theatrical cliché, but dynamically echoes the contrasts at work within the narrative – between the graceful idealisation of Lisa and the troubled, infatuated Herman; the refined French-inspired court culture (of which Lisa and the Countess are part) and the earthy way of life of the Russian people and military; and between the nobility of the values represented by Lisa (and her fiancé Yeletsky) and the grubbier, transactional nature of the officers’ gambling habits, to which Herman resorts as a desperate way of attaining the wealth which he thinks would make him worthy of her.

That contrast is emphasised by the basic eighteenth-century setting of the characters and a minimally recreated environment within a wider atmosphere of abstract, dark panels. Some of these are rotated and deployed in various configurations as mirrors that add to the superficial glitter and play of light but also create the uncanny dimension of a reflected reality. The second part even opens with a literal scene of smoke and mirrors in action, and together they further develop the ideas of haunting, shadowy memory, and the dark recesses of their personality with which the principal characters have to wrestle. Interestingly, the production happens to complement Michael Boyd’s concept of an uneasy doubling for Tchaikovsky’s other operatic masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, mounted at Garsington in 2016 and 2021 – which shares designer Tom Piper with this present production – where the dead Lensky shadowed the title role (taken by Roderick Williams).

The auditorium itself enables that penumbral interplay more effectively than most other theatres – at the beginning of the Prelude, the clear glass sides of the stage are blacked out by curtains to set the darkened scene for Herman’s obsessive brooding, and are suddenly pulled back to let the natural light flood in when a beatific vision of Lisa appears on stage. After the long interval, the descending night outside creates a naturally foreboding backdrop for the scene in the Countess’s bedchamber, overlooked by her younger double, before she is frightened to death by Herman. As the Garsington stage is entirely open to the sides with no real wings as such, it is always a potential issue for directors how they might overcome the problem of executing the stagecraft largely in full view of the audience, and the results can be fascinating. Furness and his production team deal with it ingeniously, and the dramaturgical concept they create for the performance is masterly, before one even considers the actions of the characters themselves and the music.  His additional coup de théâtre is that the apparitions of Lisa and the Countess, and the fact of Herman’s ultimately fatal effect upon them both, are arrestingly linked up with the (silent) appearance of the Empress Catherine at the ball, as in the opera’s original scenario, coming just before the interval. But here Herman manically shoots her (which is not in the scenario). What might have been a gratuitous, sensational theatrical ploy neatly focuses the intertwined fates of the three central characters at the mid-point of the performance, radiating dramatic time both forwards and backwards as the plot itself does.

Aaron Cawley (Herman) and Laura Wilde (Lisa) © Julian Guidera

The cast enhance that charged atmosphere with some vivid performances. Aaron Cawley’s Herman is nothing less than startling, encompassing an impressive range of expression from nervous staccato declamation to the impassioned power of a Heldentenor that commands our sympathy for his predicament. He draws a well delineated comparison with Laura Wilde’s glistening, warm account of Lisa, and Roderick Williams’s interpretation of Yeletsky with his finely sustained lyrical vocal lines (Mozartian in inspiration, like Tchaikovsky’s other music here to evoke the world of the eighteenth-century court).

Harriet Williams stepped in for Diana Montague in this performance. If she seemed reserved, that was perfectly in tune with the character of the older Countess, especially in her bedroom scene, as her music withered away to nothing (the proverbial dropped pin would have been heard in the auditorium – to quell an excitable, sated audience after their picnics is quite something). There might, though, have been just a degree more quivering fear in her encounter with Herman. Robert Hayward, as Tomsky, gives an effective, snide recounting of the Countess’s past encounter with Count St Germain, while Sam Furness is firmly engaged as a goading Tchekalinsky.

Douglas Boyd leads a superbly well-paced account of the opera with the Philharmonic Orchestra, avoiding the temptation to rush forwards in an artificial attempt to create drama, but maintains chilling tension by modifying tempos and silences more subtly, translating the stage’s dark shades into the music. The Prelude establishes that dramatic control in miniature with its cautious, steady opening bars (which recalls the gently treading figure of the Fifth Symphony’s first subject) building up to a surging climax. Also exemplary is the spooky grip maintained upon the niggling ostinato figure that accompanies the bedchamber scene, which opens out into a sinister, minor-key presentiment of the Nutcracker’s Waltz of the Flowers theme, reminding us what a richly rewarding score this is, equal to any of this composer’s masterpieces. This will surely prove to be one of the best things to be seen among the summer opera festivals this season.

Curtis Rogers

Featured Image: Garsington Opera’s The Queen of Spades © Clive Barda/ArenaPAL

Production:
Director – Jack Furness
Designer – Tom Piper
Lighting – Lizzie Powell
Movement director – Lucy Burge

Cast:
Herman – Aaron Cawley
Lisa / Chloe – Laura Wilde
The Countess – Harriet Williams
Count Tomsky / Plutus – Robert Hayward
Prince Yeletsky – Roderick Williams
Polina / Daphnis – Stephanie Wake-Edwards
Tchekalinsky – Sam Furness
Surin – Simon Shibambu
A Boy Captain – George Hooson
Governess – Hannah Poulsom
Masha – Alexandria Moon
Major-Domo – Will Diggle
Tchaplitsky – James Micklethwaite
Narumov – Thando Zwane
Catherine the Great – Julia Da Silva Moore
A Boy – Edward Jones

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