Bracing, original take on a real-life tragedy
Denis and Katya
Music Theatre Wales/touring
★★★★
As if inspired by both Bonnie and
Clyde and Romeo and Juliet,a couple of alienated Russian 15-year-olds at war with their families and their society took off in 2016 and barricaded themselves in a rural cabin. Firing off pistols and obviously in dangerous meltdown, Denis Muravyov and Katya Vlasova began live streaming their drunken craziness on to the social media website Periscope. As armed police moved in on them, their drama went viral on the internet. After three days, a shoot-out ensued, and conspiracy theories mushroomed over their deaths.
Following their successful adaptation of Sarah Kane’s searing exploration of clinical depression 4:48 Psychosis, composer Philip Venables and librettist-director Ted Huffman were inexorably drawn to this equally alarming material. The result is a bracingly original and bleakly powerful one-act opera, scored for two solo singers and four cellos. First performed in the US last year to great acclaim, it now reaches Britain in Music Theatre Wales’s admirable production.
Making a virtue of Russian law forbidding defamation of the dead, Venables and Huffman have avoided the obvious course of presenting Denis and Katya directly. Instead their story is related to us from the angles of journalists, teachers, medics, neighbours and friends, their partialities demonstrating how human truth is distorted, inverted, amplified and calcified into myth. What can we understand, what judgment can be made?
The two singers play all the roles, their voices and characters alternating in short outbursts. Sometimes one sings, while the other echoes the same text in speech; a friend of Denis’s babbles in hysterical Russian. The musical idiom is lean, tight and lucid: any passages of lyricism are brief and bittersweet. The quartet of cellos provides a version of baroque continuo. Clarity is paramount, but it never seems desiccated.
Huffman’s staging is exemplary – no costumes, no props, and no scenery except a large screen on to which are projected fragments of text messages exchanged during the episode, followed by a rather brilliant coup de théâtre that I must not spoil.
If I have a reservation, it is that opera singers make too cultivated a sound for this sort of narrative: this is no reflection on Johnny Herford or Emily Edmonds, who both give utterly committed and rigorously unsentimental performances. But something harsher and crisper (Lotte Lenya?) is called for.
In the audience, several parties of teenage schoolchildren sat in immobile silence throughout. They may have been bemused or bored, but my guess is that Denis and Katya spoke to them.
Touring until March 27. Tickets: musictheatre.wales
The production shows how human truth is distorted, inverted, amplified and calcified into myth