Laughter unbecoming

The Glyndebourne season began this year in a striking fashion, with a new production of Verdi’s Macbeth which treats it as a broad comedy — and naturally, from this audience, gets the laughs it is begging for. The production is by Richard Jones, as anyone who has seen one or two of his other operatic operations would soon realise. There is the obsession with cardboard boxes — in the Ring the end of the world consisted of piles of them collapsing; here, instead of Banquo’s ghost, we get a box with a smiley painted on it, jerking on to the stage and frightening Macbeth, as it would. When the curtain falls on that scene, a curtain is lowered inscribed with a much larger smiley. The opening scene of the work, after a prelude whose first bit is mimed to, obscurely, the curtain rises on three caravans, modern style, out of which the witches pop, before other witches push up the blinds and lean out to sing.