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Tragedy on the banks of the Volga
Stephen Rooke as Tikhon, Amanda Roocroft as the tragic Katerina Kabanova and Leah-Marian Jones as the domineering Kabanicha. Pictures: Robert Workman Katya Kabanova Welsh National Opera Birmingham Hippodrome **** THIS is a rather
splendid portrayal of Leoš
Janáček's tragic opera about loveless
marriages, affairs and guilt all in a wonderful set from Vicki Mortimer. The mention of sets so early is usually
review-speak for finding something, indeed anything, good to say
about a production but in this case they truly were a star in their own
right. Mortimer uses a sort of three leaf, photographic
shutter effect of three white screens, two horizontal and one vertical,
which provide a stage which can be cropped to any size. We open with a boat station waiting room on the
Volga, move to the austere hall of the Kabanov house, and
slowly getting smaller the dining room and then smallest of all the
house garden and its birch trees, like a postcard portrait. Any thoughts that only gynaecologists will have a
clue what is going on if the shutters close in much more are dispelled
right at the start of the Act II though when a ruined church in the rain
becomes cinemascope before we return to the larger aperture
of the boat station for the tragic and inevitable end.
The sets and costumes are straight from the
1950s, vaguely East European in flavour and with the colours and
lighting you used to see in old magazines and those wonderful post-war
British Rail posters. That is the stunning visual element of the
production, always interesting, and overlaid on that is the music,
directed with a mix of urgency and passion by Lothar Koenigs. The music
is lyrical and expressive of the emotions of a woman locked in a
difficult marriage with a harridan of a mother-in-law who strays in
search of unconditional affection. Wracked with guilt she finds no escape but to
take her own life which finally brings her husband to his senses. The music stands on its own as an orchestral
piece but another layer is added with some wonderful singing. As an
opera with no arias we are left largely with recitative which means
unless you happen to be fluent in Czech there is a lot of neck craning
as surtitles effectively become sub-titles rather like watching a
foreign film. Amanda Roocroft's fine soprano revels in the
title role from her happy tales of the innocence of youth with Varvara,
her foster sister-in-law to the guilt of adultery and the crushing
weight of a marriage devoid of affection or compassion. Patricia Orr, as the Kabanov foster child has a
girlish charm about her and a clear messo-soprano voice which exudes
optimism and happiness. Indeed she is the only one who has a happy
ending in the whole sorry mess, escaping with her lover Vanya (Andrew
Rees) a local schoolteacher, before the Kabanov world falls apart.
Leah-Marian Jones as the rich widow Kabanicha,
the mother-in-law, and why stop the, the mother from hell, is wonderful.
I could quite happily have strangled her myself, in time to the music of
course, with less than half an hour gone. Her controlled contralto
voice expressed her opinions in two ways nasty and marginally sweetened
nasty. She got some well deserved boos at the end. She earned them. Tichon, Katya's wife, gave us an excellent
portrayal of a man under the thumb of a domineering mother who loved his
wife, but only on the few occasions his mother allowed it. Then there was Boris, nephew of a rich merchant,
who is in love with Katya. When Katya, wracked with guilt , confesses
her affair with him to a packed crowd sheltering from the rain in a
ruined church – nice and discrete then – they are both ruined. He heads off to his uncle's factory in Siberia.
She to the depths of the Volga whence her body, in a remarkably dry
dress, is recovered and handed to a husband who has at last learned to
stand up for himself and grieve, blaming his mother for everything. Heady stuff with three elements, visual, music
and singing combining to tell a tragic tale. Roger Clarke
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