From the House of the Dead, Royal Opera review - Janáček's prison oddity prompts hot tears | reviews, news & interviews
From the House of the Dead, Royal Opera review - Janáček's prison oddity prompts hot tears
From the House of the Dead, Royal Opera review - Janáček's prison oddity prompts hot tears
Hallucinatory intensity from Mark Wigglesworth and Krzysztof Warlikowski
![](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/mast_image_landscape/public/mastimages/1105%20Willard%20W.%20White%20as%20Alexandr%20Petrovi%C4%8D%20Gorjan%C4%8Dikov%20%28C%29%20ROH.%20Photo%20by%20Clive%20Barda.jpg?itok=VWy4L-LB)
A political prisoner is brutally initiated into the life of a state penitentiary, and leaves it little over 90 minutes later. Four inmates reveal their brutal past histories with elliptical strangeness - each would need an episode of something like Orange is the New Black - and two plays staged during a holiday for the convicts take up about a quarter of the action.
Which in the hands of Mark Wigglesworth, already a superlative Janáček conductor on the evidence of his ENO Jenůfa, and the Royal Opera players sometimes defy belief in what is, astonishingly and shamefully, the House's first run of this unique masterpiece (English and Welsh National Operas, Opera North and Scottish Opera have all done the feverishness proud). Muted horns buzz furiously against shrill high frequencies, instruments are forced to the extremes of their registers; and yet there are such sudden, surging moments of terrible beauty, though rarely any respite. The musical white-heat even overwhelms Warlikowski's interesting but not entirely successful attempt to counterpoint the Prelude with Michel Foucault's thought-provoking words on the prison system; the intellectual idea and sheer naked feeling provoked by the score don't mesh here, especially as Janáček moves to a liberating anticipation of the great freedom not so much as hinted at on the screen. Around this, though, the set-up and follow-through are impeccable on their own terms. A young black basketball player (Salim Sai) stands for the wounded prison eagle (as "The Eagle") which finds its wings at the end of the opera; the frantic mime-dance of his friend (Jordan Ajadi, pictured above right) actually suits a score which, though composed in the late 1920s, seems to want to break out into hip-hop and, in the Act 2 "shows" Beyoncé. A cast of singers, sounding wonderful from chorus through small roles to the big guns, meshes perfectly with the actors; no stagy gestures or superfluous over-acting here.
Usually familiar faces like Peter Hoare, John Graham-Hall, Nicky Spence and Graham Clark - as the Old Prisoner who gets perhaps the most touching line ('he had a mother too") - are transformed beyond recognition. The first monologue, effortlessly introduced, belongs to Štefan Margita's Luka Kuzmič - crystal clear of meaning, strong of voice, balanced at the other end of the opera by the connected narrative of Johan Reuter's equally compelling Šiškov about the abused but deeply loving Akulka, one of the many invisible tragic heroines of the drama (Margita and Reuter pictured below). Here, at last, there are pauses for reflection in the haunting wordless chorus and the warmer colours the composer brings to a tragic love-triangle. Akulka, in fact, is not quite invisible in this production; Allison Cook's Prostitute, the only woman in an otherwise all-male cast, uneasily takes on her role, just as an earlier village girl is portrayed by the feminine Tatar lad Aljeja - originally intended as a boy sung by a soprano but here, as in a baffling Prague production which actually deserved the boos inexplicably unleashed at the end of last night's performance, sung by a tenor, Pascal Charbonneau.
While a tender bond with homoerotic overtones is established between Alleja and Gorjančikov the political prisoner (Willard White, still in strong voice), women are traduced throughout, even if Janáček pours all his love into Akulka's music. The blow-up dolls of the Don Juan scene can be battered in grim fun, just as the murders of men who get in the way bring forth only red confetti. Warlikowski cleverly blurs the lines between acting and being before the two musical plays in the narrative of Skuratov (a striking Royal House debut from Czech tenor Ladislav Elgr, pictured below with Charbonneau).
Sound confusing? It could be, and sometimes we wonder where we are, but the wilful blurring of lines at high velocity is Janáček's, not Warlikowski's, and the recurrent themes the director manages to impose are always disciplined. Just as there are sparks of God in most of these beings - Warlikowski, who interestingly tells us he avoided re-reading Dostoyevsky in the cause of finding universality in the composer's lopsided shapes, prefers Genet's "gold in the mud" - so colour and movement fill Małgorzata Szczęśniak's malleable designs, the big sets equally pliantly lit by Felice Ross.
Like so much else in the short but relentlessly hard hitting evening, they elude easy description. Just go, and one thing's for sure: you should emerge feeling quite different from when you went in. Kafka's axiom that a work of art should be the "axe to the frozen ice within us" applies here not only to Janáček and Dostoyevsky, but also to Warlikowski and Wigglesworth. Despite those unfathomable boos, Warlikowski in his UK operatic debut lives up to the extraordinary standards of his Phaedra(s) with Isabelle Huppert. Like that dream/nightmare vision, this is not an experience that can be easily replicated.
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Comments
I sat in a left balcony box
That did cross my mind, at
That did cross my mind, at any rate for the scenes in the prison governor's office in Act One. This has been a frequent plaint at the Royal Opera (remembering especially Christof Loy's Tristan). Directors do need to see the set from every part of the house, just as conductors need to get out there while an assistant works with the orchestra.
I was (thankfully) in the
Do you mean stage left (i.e.
Best go to listen, read the
Re Balcony Left; I had a
I haven’t yet seen the
Just because Warlikowski
Just because Warlikowski finds contemporary relevance in it certainly doesn't mean it is 'not a production of Janacek's opera'. If you want to see one that truly isn't, you can watch the Prague production online. The third act is set in a concert hall with tuxedoed gents wearing green mouth-masks, a piano and a woman wearing only knickers being shoved around the stage (that bit, at least. I 'got'; the rest not). I even used a still of it for a 'name that opera' competition, and no-one guessed correctly over two days until I provided heavy clues (ie a counter-intuitive guess at Fidelio came close). Never rule a production out until you've seen it, please.
Dear sir, If U did not
Dear Mr Spinar: Could you
I haven’t expressed any view
First, to the director of the
First, to the director of the Prague production - if I were 'old school' and 'literal', I wouldn't have praised Mr. Warlikowski's imaginatve approach. As to yours, you explain it very plausibly, but if the audience can't begin to work out the meaning - even ones who know the operatic literature - then chances are your idea didn't 'read'.One can be challenged and intuitively 'go' with something, but a stretch too far says more about the director than it does about the work. FWIW I found the direction tight - albeit too much showiness from the movement group - and was going with it, but you lost me and others in Act 3. As Strauss wrote to Hofmannsthal, the meaning must be inherent in the production itself, not in an idea that doesn't necessarily communicate.
To Mr O'Shea - in my opinion booing should NEVER happen; just withhold your applause if you disapprove. But in any case Janacek's opera is hardly a familiar classic where people expect to see any one thing. And his treatment - though not Dostoyevsky's, which is more specific - is universal and timeless. I don't suppose the people who booed were expecting a real eagle (troublesome in the Scottish Opera and WNO productions).
Mr Nice: As to booing, I
What have I missed, Mr O'Shea
What have I missed, Mr O'Shea?
An intelligent and accurate
Though I haven't read other
Though I haven't read other reviews yet I do think that critics need to take into account the difficulty, or rather the strangeness, of the work in the first place. What I do know is that I witnessed mastery in every field - work, staging, conducting, singing - and plenty of others have agreed with me.
I’ve sat in a balcony box
As far as I could tell from a
As far as I could tell from a central seat, you would lose perhaps half of the first act and a bit of the last (maybe 20 minutes out of 90?), none of the middle. So caution necessary but it's not quite as bad as you suggest.
I'd like to defend Mr Špinar
Good for you; what you say
Good for you; what you say has considerable truth. I would still prefer to see Warlikowski's production again rather than this one because I felt that actors and singers were more integrated; Špinar's campy movement group got on my nerves. As I noted above, the Prague production was certainly - that apart - very disciplined work. Was it the first time, I wonder, that Aljeja was cast as a tenor rather than the soprano-en-travesti stipulated for the original?
It's meant to be a mezzo (not
I'm finally about to see that
I'm finally about to see that. Mackerras has a very light soprano on his recording. No reason now why a treble shouldn't take on the role, is there? Though any homoeroticism would be out of the question in that case.
Well, I suppose casting a
Then why the simulacrum of an
Then why the simulacrum of an unbroken voice? Curiouser and curiouser. I think, as Warlikowski has rightly pointed out, that Janacek takes what he wants from Dostoyevsky and ties it much less to time and place, which makes an update even more plausible. Anyway, the role of Yniold in Debussy's Pelleas is nearly always taken now by a treble, and is much more convincing as a result.
Well, Octavian in
Pedants' corner: Octavian was
Pedants' corner: Octavian was actually written for a soprano, to follow in the footsteps of Mozart;s Cherubino, but both are mostly sung by mezzos these days. Of course the Prostitute here is a major part, acting-wise, in Warlikowski's production. Aljeja isn't a major part, singing-wise, compared to the four monologists, but it is important, yes. Essential, too, that there's no element of the artifice which requires a suspension of disbelief - or a frisson of lesbian love, as Britten seemed to think (and he found it repulsive) - in Rosenkavalier.
"Aljeja isn't a major part,
Agreed - it is unorthodox and
Agreed - it is unorthodox and bewildering in every respect, and yet the tension holds throughout in a performance as good as this one. Nicky Spence, who came to my Opera in Depth class on Monday to talk to the students (we're spending four afternoons on the work), said his mum was bewildered by what was going on but still loved every minute of it. I repeat myself in declaring that too few of those who have taken the Royal Opera show to task have considered the strangeness of the material. Dostoyevsky, too, writes about how incoherent the narratives of the prisoners are, and that's an essential part of the opera.
Many thanks, too, for sustaining a dialogue which I hope some readers have found as worthwhile as I have.
Absolutely. I saw it with my
I saw it last night, sitting