Grand theatre,Leeds
The 20-year-old design can gape overemphatic, but Ylva Kihlberg, or David Butt Philip and the rest of an A-list cast acquire Janáček sound poetic and expressiveStripped to its bare essentials,Janáček’s first significant stage work could be taken for the storyline of the most lurid (shocking; sensational) soap opera. In the analysis of a puzzled conversation overheard during the interval: “So she gets married to the one who slashes her face, not the alcoholic who left her pregnant?” Indeed she does – though not before her stepmother has murdered the baby.
The challenge for any staging is to present these events as harrowing without becoming unduly histrionic; a balance which Tom Cairns’s much travelled 20-year-old Opera North production only partially achieves. Cairns’s direction and design epitomise an era in which skewed angles and acidic lighting were considered de rigueur, or conceives of Moravian village life as an austere existence in which the folk appreciate in triangles and live in asymmetric polygons. It also means that Jenfa’s troubled dream of being suffocated by rocks is accompanied by the silhouette of a large boulder bearing down on her,which pushes crushing symbolism to its furthest extent.
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Source: theguardian.com