Sublime staging saves this modern opera
This is the third time in my life that I’ve endured Shostakovich’s The Nose, and I’ve just about had it. Wise authorities inform me that this opera is the inventive and exuberant work of a 21-year-old genius. But in the theatre, its two-hour duration (without interval) hangs heavy – there is something weirdly exhausting about its bipolar changes of direction, mood and pace, as well as its adolescently incoherent narrative and hysterically exaggerated comedy.
Based on a short story by Nikolai Gogol, it takes 18 scenes and 78 characters to tell the story of Kovalov, a nonentity civil servant in St Petersburg whose nose mysteriously leaves his face and takes on an awkward life of its own, paying court to distinguished personages and making trouble before returning to its rightful place.
On the page, this flight of surreal fancy is indeed as funny and disturbing as it sounds in summary; on the stage, it degenerates into chaos and cacophony. Composed in the late Twenties, when Soviet culture still had room for radical free-form experiment, the opera skitters from idiom to idiom, parodying fellow modernists such as the Viennese atonalists, the solemnities of Orthodox liturgy, the banalities of silent film scores, the raucous coarseness of the circus bands. You’re never sure whether you’re meant to mock the whole thing as a crazy, drunken joke or be terrified of it as a nightmare of castration and persecution – perhaps that’s the point?
Some directors take the score’s schizoid tendency as a licence to go bonkers with trippy Terry Gilliamesque imagery, but for this new production Barrie Kosky’s approach proves relatively restrained. He sets the opera inside the shell of an empty hall, concentrating much of the action on a circular podium. Costuming mostly suggests Gogol’s era or early Dickens, and aside from over-indulging his penchant for Tiller Girl chorus lines, he keeps the comedy focused on character rather than slapstick gags.
Much of the detail and the text (translated by David Pountney) would project better in a smaller house than Covent Garden, and it would perhaps be helpful if there were more realistic indications of specific locations. Where Kosky’s panache is most evident in his handling of the errant nose itself, the dimensions of which expand and contract to the point that it really does seem to assume personality. In its largest form, it even executes a gratuitous but engaging tap dance – the feet being supplied by stageschooboy Ilan Galkoff, who justly earned the evening’s loudest applause.
All praise to the precise and levelheaded conductor Ingo Metzmacher and his utterly brilliant orchestra, as well as a committed cast led by Martin Winkler as the hapless Kovalov, with John Tomlinson, Susan Bickley, Rosie Aldridge, Wolfgang AblingerSperrhacke and Alexander Lewis excelling in multiple supporting roles.
Alas, their talents and efforts are wasted on an opera that has no heart or soul or centre.