★★★★★
Fog drifts between towering pine trees on a circular green stage. Sunlight falls from the left. Then the platform begins to rotate, as though the world itself has started turning, and Jonathon Oxlade’s set delivers its first surprise: a weathered dollhouse flashes into view.
Its front has been lifted away to expose a family enduring poverty. Hansel sits with his head in his hands beneath the kitchen table or lies upstairs with his feet in the air. His parents mend clothes and make brooms to sell. Sparse shelves, rough boards and too many bodies compressed into a shallow wooden box tell us everything about the household before the singing does.
It looks like a dream, but it is a nightmare. In such circumstances, children must make their own fantasies of abundance: forests full of berries, houses made of sugar and ovens into which oppressive forces can be pushed and burned. If only poverty, market forces and the ruling class could be dispatched so easily.
Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera began as entertainment for the children of his sister and librettist, Adelheid Wette. Director Constantine Costi calls the result “a lullaby with teeth”: folk song and prayer carried by an orchestra of almost Wagnerian proportions.
His production takes that description seriously. It offers enchantment without pretending that hunger is enchanting.
Costi locates the story inside the frantic imaginations of Hansel and Gretel. The forest is not a destination reached by leaving home but a psychological space into which home keeps intruding. At one point their father, Peter, asleep or drunk at the table, rotates through the action. The world beyond the cottage is built from the emotional material found within it.
That makes Catherine Carby’s doubling as Gertrude and the Witch the production’s defining interpretive decision. Costi’s program note draws on the child’s fear that the person who feeds you might also devour you: in the imagination of Hansel and Gretel, mother and monster become one figure capable of both love and threat.
Carby’s Gertrude is terrifying when the jug containing the family’s only milk is broken. She loses control and banishes the children to the forest on impulse. Yet her pallid face is marked by the same hunger as theirs, and regret follows the explosion almost immediately. Scarcity is turning her into someone she never wanted to become; she is no closer than her children to the life she once imagined.
The production’s sympathy for her matters because the opera can too easily make the mother the household villain while Peter drinks and squanders. Even the broom carries that contradiction. It represents the domestic labour keeping the family afloat but becomes the object through which women and housework are demonised: the housekeeper who must make everything function is cast as the enemy of pleasure.
As the Witch, Carby returns in sculpted 1980s shoulder pads, bright red hair, red gloves and a severe white confectioner’s uniform. She colours selected phrases with a witchy edge without cackling her way through entire arias. The result preserves both the comedy and the threat.
Before that transformation, Peter arrives at the apex of Oxlade’s tallest pine tree, having climbed above the misery below. Morgan Pearse plays him as a larrikin intoxicated by a rare day of profitable broom sales and by the celebration that followed.
Instead of saving for the next lean period, he has splurged on everything the family has been craving. “Hunger is the best cook,” he sings, but what use is a cook without ingredients? In this household, deprivation turns into gluttony the moment abundance becomes possible.
Pearse brings the evening’s most precise diction and an ease that makes Peter’s tra-la-la refrain its most persistent earworm, rivalled only by the cuckoo calls passed between voices and orchestra. The charm never entirely erases the question of why Gertrude bears the burden of making scarcity work while Peter gets the showier pleasure of temporarily ending it.
Kangmin Justin Kim’s Australian debut as Hansel is more than novel casting. Hansel is traditionally a mezzo-soprano trouser role; here, Kim’s countertenor changes the dramatic charge of familiar jokes. When Gretel offers him a flower wreath, and he protests that it is “for girls”, the line becomes a small examination of gender rather than a routine gag.
Costi extends the thought when the siblings dress in their mother’s clothes and apply lipstick. It is children’s play, an exploration of gender and a sly image of theatrical performance itself. What is opera, after all, if not dressing up together and discovering what another voice or body might permit?
Kim and Sofia Troncoso have buoyant chemistry and sharp comic timing. Their early dance is a highlight, and Kim’s countertenor soars when Hansel learns that rice pudding may be waiting for dinner.
Their voices blend with an unusual brightness, and their squabbles, private jokes and instinctive physical closeness make them recognisable as siblings rather than adults demonstrating generic childishness. At times the orchestral balance challenged the voices. Gretel emerges as the more decisive child, while Hansel is seduced by the Witch’s excess.
Hansel is seduced by the Witch’s excess; Gretel recognises the trap and watches for an opening. That contrast echoes their parents: Peter gives in to appetite, while Gertrude tries to stretch one jug of milk across a day.
Gretel learns from the adults without surrendering to their authority. She uses the Witch’s own hocus-pocus to release Hansel, communicates the plan and fights beside him.
Their victory is shared: one child takes each of the Witch’s legs as they force her towards the flames. State Opera describes the work as a celebration of self-reliance, but the production’s more persuasive ideal is mutual reliance. The children save themselves because they still have each other.
Oxlade’s forest is constructed from layered, cut-out conifers, as simple as the trees in a picture book and as changeable as a thought. Bernie Tan-Hayes turns those flat green shapes into a living emotional landscape. Blue and cyan haze makes them loom; red light announces the Witch’s proximity; ominous timpani seem to stir the darkness itself. The revolving stage continually rearranges scale and perspective without impeding the singers.
Away from their parents, the children are initially frightened by freedom. The cuckoos have eaten their breadcrumbs; the household rules no longer apply, and there is nobody else to protect them. Gradually, fear gives way to play. They recognise that they are not alone and fall asleep in one another’s arms.
The close of the second act supplies the production’s most magical transformation. The green trees open into silver reflections. Before the fourteen guardian children appear, lanterns are placed one by one around the revolving stage until its circle is filled with light. Each child lifts a lantern and bathes Hansel and Gretel in its glow. Humperdinck’s Evening Prayer, childhood faith, Oxlade’s geometry and Tan-Hayes’s light briefly become indivisible.
Lucy Stoddart’s Sandman and Dew Fairy frame that sleep as a passage rather than an escape. Their appearances are brief, but Oxlade gives them comic extravagance: ballooning pantaloons, sand billowing from sleeves, a face crowned by a radiant sun or topped by a long-pointed hat.
Stoddart has described the Sandman’s music as luxurious and dreamlike, a line that sits beautifully in the voice; the Dew Fairy begins the day again with a shorter, jumpier, bell-like quality. In collaboration with conductor Dane Lam, she makes the two roles not merely night and morning but surrender and reanimation.
The Witch’s house is Oxlade’s funniest and most revealing invention. It first appears as a tiny gingerbread model hanging from a tree, far too small to enter. The Witch is comically revealed inside it and then wears it around her head. As the children nibble at the tree, they mistake her voice for the wind; later, the miniature house is placed over Gretel’s head. The abundance exists at the scale of imagination. Want can make a tiny prop feel like a feast.
Comedy vanishes when the fantasy opens onto an industrial kitchen. Grey-blue walls, metal plates, hanging tools and an abattoir-like oven replace confectionery charm. The oven burns like a red mouth in a cold wall. Carby’s Witch becomes frightening precisely because she has been so funny: the children and audience have both been encouraged to underestimate her.
Under Lam, the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra brings out the score’s central contradiction. Folk melodies, dances and cuckoo calls emerge from an orchestral body capable of Wagnerian grandeur.
When the spell breaks, the State Opera Children’s Chorus does not function as a sentimental decoration. These are a collective of exploited children, evidence that Hansel and Gretel’s ordeal is systemic rather than exceptional. Their release widens the story from one hungry family to all children living under, or attempting to escape, poverty.
The reunion with the parents cannot simply reset the household. The children have imagined a world in which the person hoarding abundance can be overpowered and the imprisoned can be freed.
Outside the theatre, ovens will not consume poverty, market forces or wealthy oligarchs on command. Yet fairy tales like Hansel & Gretel endure because they allow children to name what adults have normalised and to imagine that the world, like Oxlade’s circular stage, might turn again.
Hansel & Gretel is presented by State Opera South Australia and runs to 29 August 2026 at Her Majesty’s Theatre. 58 Grote Street Adelaide SA 5000.
Tickets are available here.
Website: https://www.stateopera.com.au/productions/2026/hansel-and-gretel
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/stateoperasouthaustralia/
Photo credits: Andrew Beveridge
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