TWO siblings find themselves outcast and alone, wandering around helplessly, with no prospect of good counsel from their hapless father. But that’s enough about Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump. Let us turn, instead, to something much more edifying, namely, Scottish Opera’s new film based upon German composer Engelbert Humperdinck’s famous opera Hansel and Gretel.

The movie is directed by Daisy Evans, who has received considerable acclaim for her innovative work with London-based company Silent Opera. It records a concert performance that was staged, sans audience, at Glasgow’s splendid Theatre Royal back in December of last year.

From the very outset, when we see Hansel and Gretel (played with gusto by a cross-cast, but emphatically boyish, Kitty Whately and Rhian Lois) mucking about with the accoutrements of modern childhood, we know that we are in the present day. Evans sticks with Humperdinck’s narrative in which the children are put into the forest, not by a wilfully wicked stepmother, but by their desperately impoverished and exasperated mother (a palpably overwrought Nadine Benjamin, whose anxiety is heightened, in this rendering, by pregnancy).

Sent to gather berries, as there is no food in the house, the children’s plight is caused, not by innate evil, but by the kind of poverty that has been illuminated so painfully in our own society by the Covid pandemic. When food does finally arrive, it comes courtesy of a triumphant and inebriated father (Phillip Rhodes on gloriously bullish form), who rolls in, slurping comically from a can of lager.

However, his joyful exuberance is short-lived. Hansel and Gretel are already lost in the deep, dark forest.

In terms of storytelling, Evans’s version of the folktale sits neatly between tradition and modern allegory. In aesthetic terms, her film is similar to movies of live stage performances one might expect to see on a TV channel like BBC Four or Sky Arts.

Recorded to a high quality in both sound and vision, the show never pretends to be anything other than filmed theatre. The Scottish Opera orchestra is always visible, playing Humperdinck’s beautifully harmonic music from the Theatre Royal stage.

For their part, the singers perform in front of the musicians, on a temporary stage that has been built over the orchestra pit. Evans switches perspective back-and-forth between close-ups on the singers and more panoramic views of Theatre Royal stage, complete with its superb, gilded proscenium arch.

Recorded “as live”, the film has a charmingly rough aspect to it. For instance, a prop error towards the end (in which a broomstick becomes ensnared in a shopping trolley and is whirled amusingly around the stage) makes the cut, almost as a testament to the movie’s unedited theatricality.

As a concert performance, this is opera on a limited budget. The director highlights this mischievously in ways that will please or irritate, according to taste.

The broomstick of the cannibalistic witch (played with wonderful idiosyncrasy by the versatile Nadine Benjamin) is rendered magical by simply wrapping some tinsel around it. The witch’s diabolic oven is miniaturised to fit easily in the supermarket trolley filled with confectionery that stands in for the gingerbread house.

There is, unquestionably, oodles of chutzpah in such choices. However, one can’t help but wonder if more impressive, less deliberately parsimonious options might have worked better.

Such complaints border on nitpicking, however, when one considers the overall scheme of the film. Highly original and brilliantly performed, this Hansel and Gretel is a lockdown gift for opera lovers.

Hansel and Gretel is currently streaming at scottishopera.org.uk