The Fairy Queen, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

This evening delivered a couple of firsts. To mark the 350th anniversary of Purcell’s birth Glyndebourne Festival Opera has mounted a lavish new production of The Fairy Queen – the first of Purcell’s full-length stage works to be seen at the festival and surely the first production of any opera there to feature an X-rated scene in which a horde of giant bunnies rushes on to the stage to do what bunnies do.

That is just one of the surprises in store. Officially classified a “semi-opera”, The Fairy Queen irreverently cuts and slices Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and serves it up in an extravagant blend of music, dance and visual spectacle. The premiere almost bankrupted Queen’s Theatre in Dorset Garden in 1692 and Jonathan Kent, Glyndebourne’s director, has insouciantly gone for broke, too.

The cast is huge. For the spoken play he has a full company of strong actors, led by Sally Dexter (pictured) and Joseph Millson as the predatory Titania and Oberon, and Desmond Barrit as a delightfully dead-pan Bottom hailing from the Welsh valleys. There is a hyperactive dance troupe, kitted out as harpy-like fairies. And the stage staff manning the scenic transformations and flying equipment must be on overtime.

The tableaux flash past, threatening overkill: Titania caught in a spider’s web, swans that turn into fairies, the sun-god descending from the ceiling, Adam and Eve wearing oversized fig-leaves under a golden tree in the Garden of Eden. Kent’s scatter-gun approach misses the intellectual rigour that made Graham Vick’s pioneering staging of King Arthur in 1995 so memorable, but the irrepressible joie de vivre of everybody involved wins the day.

Played in full, The Fairy Queen makes a long evening – the opening night overran by almost 25 minutes – but there was never a dull moment. The music was in the inspiring hands of conductor William Christie with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in scintillating form, and a variable cast of young singers included the excellent Lucy Crowe and Andrew Foster-Williams. Best of all was the stillness that fell over the performance as Carolyn Sampson sang “The Plaint” – a timely reminder that Purcell can also do very well when left alone, thank you. ★★★★☆