Hocus pocus! Laurent Pelly’s little parable for our times which passed for Hänsel und Gretel at Glyndebourne this summer is now setting off on tour. And, if the energetic education work in tow is anything to go by, boys and girls everywhere will be thinking twice before sneaking extra packets of crisps and chocolate bars into the supermarket trolley.

This Hänsel and this Gretel live in a cardboard box, so they’re all the more delighted when a packed supermarket appears in the wood, and a witch at the check-out encourages them to take all they like. And the saved children, her previous victims, are all, of course, obese — and they remain so, even when the spell is broken. A contemporary conceit stuck on to a timeless tale often simply reduces its rich layers of resonance — and this one certainly does. It’s a one-dimensional Hänsel und Gretel, conducted by Robin Ticciati with a little sentiment but no sentimentality. The Glyndebourne Orchestra on Tour play tenderly and exuberantly.

But it’s a bit of an anticlimax when the witch simply falls backwards off a tower of stacked biscuits. There were singers who actually turned down the role for fear of injury. The feisty and fearless Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke — what a perfect name for a Humperdinck nasty! — returns from the main summer festival, and for the early part of the tour. He struts around, discarding his petunia-pink suit and wig for a ghastly hermaphroditic half-nakedness. Neither this, nor his crackling enunciation, is really frightening though.

The terror of parental severance, of growing up and of the dark night of the psyche in the German forest — none of this really touches either us or even the American mezzo Elizabeth DeShong’s portly, ripely voiced Hänsel and the Slovenian soprano Bernarda Bobro’s honey-tongued, sweetly idiomatic Gretel. Stéphane Marlot, directing this revival, tries very hard with the body language and draws lively performances from Miranda Keys as Mother and from Klaus Kuttler, who returns to sing Father. In the dying forest, Nicola Hughes twinkles as the Sandman, and Rhian Lewis, on Saturday, stood in for an indisposed Eliana Pretorian as the Dew Fairy.

Box office: 01273 813813, until Nov 1; then at New Victoria, Woking (0870 0606645) Nov 4-8; Regent, Stoke on Trent (0870 0606649) Nov11-15 2008

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