Doing Janáček very proud indeed
Opera
From the House of the Dead
Royal Opera, Covent Garden
★★★★★
It’s taken 90 years for Janáček’s final masterpiece to reach Covent Garden, but now it’s arrived the Royal Opera has done it proud. This production is a mightily impressive achievement: my only reservation is that it didn’t deliver the visceral punch of the Welsh National Opera’s revival last autumn.
This shortage of emotional impact can largely be ascribed to the modish decision to transfer the historical setting. Janáček envisaged a 19thcentury Siberian prison camp, as depicted in his source, Dostoevsky’s novella. The Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski, however, clearly believes that the audience lacks any imagination, and therefore clobbers us with a contemporary parallel – the gymnasium of a high-surveillance penitentiary of a sort that you might see in a Channel 4 documentary, meticulously reproduced in Małgorzata Szczęśniak’s awesome designs.
And just in case you still don’t get the point, between the scenes he runs film of the radical French philosopher Michel Foucault expounding his arcane poststructuralist theories of judicial punishment as a conspiracy of the empowered and an ideological fraud.
Instead of making the opera’s message more vividly immediate, all this apparatus serves only to obscure it. This isn’t an opera about the iniquities of incarceration: what Janáček’s music expresses is simply the pure Christian, Tolstoyan belief that even the most sinful among us remain human beings – “he once had a mother too” – and that violence is often enacted under extreme provocation which, if not pardonable, is at least explicable. Warlikowski’s approach, with its stylisations and exaggerations, shifts the focus to the prison system itself and distances us from Janáček’s intimate exposure of the pathetic souls of these desperate convicts. There’s also something comparably chilly about Mark Wigglesworth’s conducting. The orchestra is on magnificent form, and every note is articulated in its raw intensity. But from the get-go there’s something hectic about the pitch and pace that doesn’t allow for warmth and shade or growth to a climax: it’s the aural equivalent of the relentless strip and floodlighting on the set, and it’s exhausting. This is an opera for an ensemble of actors who sing, and that is precisely and admirably what is presented here. Štefan Margita, Ladislav Elgr and especially Johan Reuter give robust accounts of the narrative monologues that form the score’s core, and everyone else on stage gives their all: I only wish that the net effect of their commitment wasn’t so clinically heartless.
Until March 24. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk