The slightly tilted stage is bare but for the sign VÝCHOD on a door at the back. What does this signify… if you can’t guess or are not a Czech speaker, it means EXIT. And there is no exit for poor Katya Kabanova, except the usual one for many doomed opera female leads.
Although set in a different period, in many ways it is very like director David Alden’s ENO Jenůfa, which I saw in March this year, and again it brings his staging of Britten’s Peter Grimes to mind. Katya Kabanova looks to be set in the period it was written, 1921. Gabrielle Dalton’s costume design spans the two generations. Alden does not overgild the lily.
Hannah Postlethwaite’s design—cracked and peeling wall, a single icon that blazes, a grey church hall that has seen better days—is minimalist. Tim Mitchell’s red colour wash in the second act tells us as much as Leoš Janáček’s score full of Moravian folk melodies, full of promise, and ominous premonition. Mitchell’s water rippling back projection complements the music, playful, bucolic and dramatic.
Inspired by his own deep love for a married woman, and apparently by Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, Janáček poured all his love into it: “Katya”, he wrote, “is one of my most tender works”. It is given wondrous life by a brilliant cast, but above all by soprano Natalya Romaniw as Katya. She is the reason I wanted to see this production. What a powerful voice, fierce and lyrical, emotional, passionate, moving.
The victim of hypocrisy, the venality of the merchant class, the matriarch / mother-in-law from hell with her evil little smile: not a promising scenario for Katya. Is she doomed from the start or does she bring on her own downfall? Or is it fate?
Married to a mummy’s boy, Tichon (tenor Adrian Thompson), Katya is a good girl, begs to go with him when he is sent on a business trip, but widowed mother Kabanicha (contralto Susan Bullock, who has made this role her own) says no, and what mother says goes. It’s all for show, this propriety, these required tears at his departure.
The adopted daughter Varvara (mezzo Katie Bray full of the insouciance of youth) shows Katya another way. Dangles the key to the garden gate where she meets her lover, teacher Vanya Kudrjas (warm tenor Benjamin Hulett).
Katya has long had eyes for Boris (Thomas Atkins), nephew of rich old merchant Dikoj (bass Clive Bayley—also in the Royal Opera House 2019 Richard Jones production), under whose thumb he is because of inheritance expectations. So he won’t stand by her… he’ll do as his uncle says when he sends him away.
Their duets are wonderful: she swims in his arms—would he have treated her better later? It’s like Vershinin leaving Masha in Three Sisters. Women are easy fodder, but once had… The final act in the church with its huge crucifix is where I see Peter Grimes, the village folk as false witnesses. The storm brings the crucifix down. A metaphor?
Katya is her own worst enemy when she confesses to loving Boris in the church during an electrical storm. Dikoj (with his Tolstoyan beard) says it's the judgement of God. He should worry as he crawls on his knees before Kabanicha, his dominatrix. Walls turn red, and she turns the icon to the wall before the deed—this is hypocrisy on a Tartuffean scale.
Yet, so provincial Russian, so judgmental. Indeed, the 1859 play The Storm, on which Katya Kabanova is based, was a work of social criticism, and the censor was worried Ostrovsky was caricaturing the late tsar Nikolai I in Kabanicha… hmm...
A scarlet woman now in her red dress, what can Katya do but throw herself into the wide Volga River. Tichon seems upset: I have seen Tichon played as much more of a macho brute than this. Kabanicha coldly thanks the parishioners—“thank you good people”.
If Janáček keeps the libretto simple and understated, his music expresses so much more. That final duet between Katya and Boris is heartbreaking. Especially when we see Varvara and Vanya running away to Moscow and leaving these accursed uptight provinces behind.
The joy in their voices underlines the tragedy of Katya’s personality and fate. She is alone, melancholy, dreamy, a beautiful soul too good for this life. A bird, she needs to fly—and Romaniw’s voice flies high—her spirit is shrivelled here. Her solos reveal her religious soul, her fears, her longings.
Sung in Czech, which thrills me, as does the orchestra in the capable hands of conductor Stephen Barlow, but why is the theatre not full? Come on country house opera people, this is worth every penny you can muster. Three performances left. Fill those seats, you won’t regret it, the production, though tragic, is inspiring. And it’s not too long.