Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

by Dmitri Shostakovitch

seen at the Coliseum on 8 October 2015

This new production from ENO (in participation with several European opera houses) is directed and designed originally by Dmitri Tcherniakov, and conducted by Mark Wigglesworth, he new music director of English National Opera. It stars Patricia Racette as Katerina, John Daszak as Sergei, Robert Hayward as Boris and Peter Hoare as Zinovy.

The story, based on a work by Nicolai Leskov, is grim and oppressive: Katerina, the bored second wife of Zinovy, takes as a lover the new employee Sergei. When her father-in-law Boris discovers the affair (and also tries to rape her) she adds rat poison to his dish of mushrooms, and he dies in great pain. Later Zinovy is murdered by the couple. On their wedding day Katerina breaks under the strain of a police raid and confesses the murders. While the pair are in prison, Sergei has become indifferent to Katerina, and tricks her into giving him some new stockings which he immediately gives to a new woman. Katerina plots the death of this woman and herself.

This rather squalid tale is transformed into a powerful drama by means of Shostakovitch's music, by turns grim, sardonic and tender; he felt sympathy for Katerina as a victim and so gives full rein to portraying her desperate boredom and her equally desperate (and deluded) fixation on Sergei - who is barely less brutish than all the other men around her. Famously the opera was a great success in 1934, but was savagely attacked in an article in Pravda in early 1936 just days after Stalin walked out of a performance in Moscow. This in turn was drastically detrimental to the composer's career.

The singers in this production were excellent, Katerina by turns completely disaffected and passionate, Sergei a sexual bully who appears pleasant only when things go well, but who reveals his essential callousness when his fortunes slide, Boris sanctimonious but cruel, Zinovy out of his depth and inconsequential. They were well supported by the minor characters and by the chorus of factory workers. The orchestral playing was also superb, leading to shattering climaxes but equally attentive to the far quieter lyrical moments, and also well aware of the comic potential of some scenes.

The production was in modern dress, set in a modern factory or dispatch warehouse. The office girls had desktops, while the working men were in overalls and used forklift trucks. Encased within this setting was Katerina's room, the walls and floor completely covered with patterned carpets of  mainly red and orange hues - an extremely effective contrast to the clinical atmosphere of the factory. On the whole this arrangement gave a very satisfactory underscoring of Katerina's predicament, though in the third act the first appearance of the policemen in the factory space seemed incongruous as they were busy complaining at not being invited to the wedding feast and needing a pretext to go there, even as they were prowling around.

In the fourth act, everything was confined to a tiny prison cell in which Katerina was incarcerated. Sonyetka, an attractive young woman, is thrust into the space, so that when Sergei visits he is immediately aware of her, and the demand for Katerina's stockings as payment for sexual favours is made effectively in her presence, but apparently without her awareness. In the story - and in the only other production of this opera that I have seen - the final act takes place while a group of prisoners is in transit, hence the chorus's moving lament about the cold and unpleasant conditions of their march. (Here, the chorus in the fourth act was always invisible.) Katerina also plans and executes Sonyetka's demise (and her own) in the open country - they drown in a river - whereas here she attacks her rival in the cell and is then beaten to death by the prison guards. This is all very well except that the chorus still sings the original text, and Katerina's long rumination about the black river hardly makes sense in a prison cell. Here, sight and sound were most obviously at odds, though each was so powerful that the disjunction was just about acceptable..