The Cunning Little Vixen

by Leoš Janáček

seen at the London Coliseum on 22 February 2022

Martyn Brabbins conducts Sally Matthews as the Vixen and Lester Lynch as the Forester in Jamie Manton's new production of  Leoš Janáček's 1924 opera The Cunning Little Vixen, based on a newspaper comic strip by Rudolf Těsnolídek which had triggered his imagination.

The Forester captures the vixen cub and attempts to domesticate her, but inevitably it doesn't work out well: his wife and children, and the family dog, are less than impressed and in any case the vixen's inherent nature cannot be tamed. After attacking a patriarchal cockerel she escapes, falls pregnant to a fox, and they begin to bring up the next generation. In the meantime there are petty jealousies in the village community. A trap set for the vixen is foiled, but a poacher shoots her. The Forester sees another cub; will the cycle be repeated?

It's a strange piece, sometimes whimsical, with gorgeous musical attention paid to the natural world - all sorts of creatures inhabit the forest where the vixen lives - and a powerful sense of the cyclical nature of life lies beneath the surface vignettes of both village and animal life. The somewhat minimalist design by Tom Scutt revealed the stark vastness of the Coliseum stage which is hard to reconcile with settings in the natural world. A single huge sheet dropped from a cylindrical drum suspended above the stage unfurled progressively throughout the performance with stylised evocations of the passage of the seasons, but this served to emphasise a disorienting staginess about the whole affair.

As well as the primary characters there was a panoply of critters moving about - a frog, a cricket, a grasshopper, a mosquito, a large number of fox cubs, and so forth - and also a soberly dressed stage crew moving huge screens and stylised piles of logs into various positions. In the domestic setting the human characters wore peasant clothing, but the cockerel was a gorgeous overblown narcissist, while the dog was inexplicably a huge sphere of fur. Personally I did not find this vision particularly convincing; I preferred the celebrated Bill Bryden production for Covent Garden originally staged in 1990, a revival of which I saw in 2010, in which the mysteriousness of the world was more compelling.

Musically this ENO production was attractive, with radiant orchestral playing in the great climaxes and fine singing by the principals. Visually, however, I felt let down.