Majestic Majeski more than atones for the flawed setting
The patience of Royal Opera fans has been wearing thin recently, as the gimmicky, erratically cast Ring has been followed by a flat-footed Hansel and Gretel and a wildly misguided Queen of Spades.
This new production of Janáček’s
Kát’a Kabanová will bring respite: it is strongly acted, carefully executed and superbly conducted, with a magnificent central performance. But the concept behind the staging reduces its emotional impact.
Director Richard Jones has updated Janáček’s source, Ostrovsky’s 1859 play The Storm, to the Sixties or the Seventies. Antony Mcdonald’s designs suggest a bleak urban landscape of Communist Europe. A plain wooden box frames the action. The Kabanovs live in a respectable suburban villa; elsewhere there is only a park bench, a bus shelter and a battered car.
It may not be much of a place to live, but it implies a world in which there are trains, telephones, televisions, state welfare and a degree of sexual licence. Ostrovsky and Janáček had something far more terrible in mind: an isolated peasant village, in which the inhabitants are primitively superstitious to the point of disbelieving in electricity. Unhappily married Kát’a is entirely imprisoned here, burdened with a hellfire notion of the sin of adultery and the social disgrace that exposure of her affair with Boris would entail.
By updating the setting to a more mobile and liberal era, Jones makes Kát’a seem pathetically neurotic rather than tragic, eliminating any sense of the Kabanovs’ superior status and leaving one wondering why she just didn’t pack her bags. Whatever became of historical imagination? Why are opera directors today so reluctant to address the past? Why do they think that relating everything to the present automatically makes it more real?
Still, Jones has rehearsed everything immaculately and on its own terms, the production carries conviction. It is also elevated by the exquisite singing of the American soprano Amanda Majeski as Kát’a, played as a gawky misfit and dreamer. The remainder of the cast has little to do, but does it very well – Susan Bickley is in Hyacinth Bucket mode as the gruesome Kabanicha, Emily Edmonds and Andrew Tortise provide light relief as Varvara and Kudrjas. The opera is sung in Czech, and even without understanding that language, one can tell that Pavel Cernoch (Boris) is its only native speaker.
Making his Covent Garden debut, Edward Gardner conducts with a vivid sense of the music’s aching tenderness and pain. Plenty of tickets are still available: whatever one’s reservations, they should be snapped up.