Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk review – Birmingham Opera Company misses the mark

“Muddle instead of music,” said Pravda in 1936 of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Stalin had attended a performance at the Bolshoi. Shostakovich was lucky to escape with his life. His masterpiece, until then the most acclaimed Russian opera of the 20th century, was not so lucky. Comrade Stalin interpreted the work as an attack on the Soviet regime, i.e. him, and it was banned.

The Pravda article ended a run of success for Lady Macbeth in Moscow and Leningrad in 1934, Cleveland, New York and Stockholm in 1935 and Prague, Ljubljana, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Zurich in 1936. After the war, Shostakovich withdrew the opera “for revision,” and it did not reappear in the repertory until the 1960s.

Shostakovich was doubly fortunate as Hitler banned Lady Macbeth, too. To be seen as a threat by Nazis and Soviets alike was quite a compliment. Apparently, the two most prolific killers of the 20th century – until scooped by Mao Tse Tung in his Great Leap Forward – found the heroic treatment of the adulterous, promiscuous and murdering heroine Katerina as nothing less than an affront to their perverted version of morality. 

After the ban, Shostakovich trod that fine line between artistic integrity and submission to the whims of the regime that allowed him to survive – just. That is, until he redeemed himself in Stalin’s eyes with the Leningrad Symphony – his Seventh – famously adapted for defiant, broadcast performance in the city, under siege by Nazi troops, by a scratch amateur orchestra in August 1942.

In 1935 The New York Sun raged at Lady Macbeth as “pornophony”, referring to what can only be honestly described as Shostakovich’s rutting score during the sexual abuse, rape and violent lovemaking scenes. The opera in its original form is highly explicit.

In recent times – such as Graham Vick’s 2014 production for New York’s Metropolitan Opera – the focus has sharpened on the social dilemma of Lady Macbeth, Katerina, forced into a hapless marriage and stifled by convention. Birmingham Opera Company, also directed by Mr Vick, has now reverted to rutting. The 2019 production, currently available on Operavision Europe here, is not for the faint-hearted:

Scenes of rape, the chorus and supporting walk-on cast simulating copulation with chairs, tables, lamps – anything to hand really – abound. Casual acts of sexual abuse are threaded through the plot. The production adds fuel to the opera’s original fire. The performance takes place “in the round” in Edgbaston’s Tower Ballroom, a tatty basement space now used as a racy nightclub. 

The traditional fourth wall, dividing stage action from the audience, is nowhere in evidence. The result is a melee. There is a makeshift elevated stage on which some of the action takes place. But this quickly moves to the dancefloor, where it engulfs attendees, who are obliged to duck, dive and scramble to avoid being crushed by writhing copulators on wheeled trucks, onrushing beds, and flying camera dollies desperately attempting to follow the frenetic action.

And frenetic is this production’s problem. block9, the design company whose descriptor is “Temporary Alternative Realities”, certainly live up to self-billing. My gripe is that this production is all about slick delivery. Sod the plot. The alternative reality has little to do with the Shostakovich opera. 

Yes, Lady Macbeth is designed to shock, but to truly shock the fourth wall must be somewhere in evidence. An audience needs space within which to reflect on the horrors confronting it. In Birmingham, the prime objective was to keep out of the way. The risk of being run over was real.

What caused Stalin to blow his top back in the day? The plot seems cleanly divorced from any political critique. The opera begins in Mtsensk in the 1840s. In a wealthy, middle-class home, Katerina bemoans a comfortable but dull life. Her husband, Zinovi – much older – enters to bid her farewell; he has been called away on business to attend to a broken dam. 

Before he leaves, he makes her swear on an icon that she will be faithful in his absence. In the Birmingham production, the icon was of Margaret Thatcher as a fridge magnet which raised a laugh. And the point was? Undoubtedly it was not a compliment.

Elderly father-in-law Boris is a witness to Katerina’s pledge. When Zinovi has left, the servants of the house begin to harass the cook, Aksinias. Leading the pack of servants is Sergei, a recent hire. When Katerina comes to Aksinias’ rescue, Sergei engages her in a flirtatious wrestling match. Yes… I’ve always wondered about that, too.

Father-in-law enters, roaring disapproval. He will tell Zinovi what has been going on in his absence. Later that night, Sergei visits Katerina in her room, offering to keep her from her boredom. When Boris comes to remove the candles and lock the door to Katerina’s bedroom, Sergei hides himself inside. It’s a lock-in, with inevitable consequences.

The next morning, after Sergei escapes through the bedroom window, he is fiercely beaten by Boris, who has waited for him. Boris orders Sergei to be locked in the cellar while Katerina cooks something for him to eat. She spins up a plate of poisoned mushrooms, which Boris eats before he dies swiftly. 

When Zenovi returns, Sergei and Katerina are in bed together, so Sergei hides again. Zinovi has heard rumours of what has been occurring in his house. He denounces Katerina for her infidelity before calling Sergei from his hiding place; together, they strangle Zinovi and dump his body in the cellar. In Birmingham, instead of the cellar, a deep freeze in the kitchen is used. Oh, oh! Bound to be discovered when any random guest goes seeking ice for the voddy. 

Yup! Later, a peasant has discovered Boris’ corpse and rushes off to the local plod. When they arrive at Katerina’s home, she is celebrating her marriage to Sergei. The newlyweds are hauled off to jail, protesting their innocence. As the prisoners are being marched off to Siberia, the incorrigible Sergei has begun to flirt with another prisoner, Sonetka. 

He convinces Katerina to give him her only pair of warm stockings, which he then gives to Sonetka. When Sonetka mocks Katerina about losing her lover, Katerina shoves her into the nearby river before leaping in to drown herself. Curtain. 

Katerina was sung by American mezzo-soprano Chrystal E Williams. It wasn’t her fault she was cast as an impulsive fur-coated brat princess instead of the conflicted and complex character the composer intended. Her performance is nonetheless a tour de force. I saw her in the Met’s recent Philip Glass’ Akhenaten production, where she sang a mesmerising Matektaten. 

She is self-assured. Her voice copes with the demands of coloratura and the growly bits in a low register. She had plenty of growly bits to sing as she bumps off most cast members — what an inspired choice for the role. 

Brendan Gunnell, best described as a heroic tenor, was not well served by his casting as a reversed baseball cap, trailer-trash lout. He needed to summon all the heroism he could to fulfil his direction, to be uncompromisingly brutal and yobbish.

The point of the opera is that the romantic interest character, Sergei, is juxtaposed to the boring husband, Zinovy. Sergei should not be simply a beery lout perpetually on the ran dan. It misses the point.

The originally intended romantic lure of the unattainable was here sacrificed on an altar of crudity, an embarrassing scene of leg-twitching, violent seduction of Katarina by Sergei, mercifully under bedcovers. The audience actually LOL’d (laughed out loud) as the leg twitching abated in perfect time with the score.

American baritone, Eric Greene, took on the role of the ghastly father-in-law, Boris. His role was distorted in a Harvey Epstein, pervy way. He was portrayed as a sexually demanding 40-something predator. The original Nikolai Leskov novel calls for a prying 80-year-old nuisance with a passing interest in seducing his daughter in law to compensate for his son’s sexual inadequacy. 

The misrepresentation unbalanced the plot. Thrusting Kristina’s hand down his trousers as his son headed off to fix the dam was not the most subtle stage direction.

Greene rose to the intense demands of his manic character until collapsing in a poisoned mushroom froth. He, too, was a catch for the Birmingham company. I suspect the magnetic power of Graham Vick to be in play.

So, too for Joshua Stewart, the hapless husband, Zinovy, an American tenor who divides his time between opera and jazz. Sadly, he was directed to invoke only contempt, and he gallantly wimped his way through his role as instructed. 

All character subtlety was lost, and his demise came as a blessed relief instead of provoking a curdling cry for vengeance. Not Stewart’s fault. He was doing his director’s bidding.

Alpesh Chauhan, music director of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, kept the score in good shape – via complex arrangements of screens and separately located sections of his orchestra. There was none of Stalin’s alleged “muddle” on display. An alarming moment when the wind section inexplicably appeared stage left in bloodstained wedding dresses as extras was just one of Chauhan’s many challenges. The power of the Shostakovich score was unimpaired. 

Shostakovich had clearly not brushed up his Shakespeare. In the “Scottish play”, Lady Macbeth is a manipulative power grabber, egging her husband on to murder to further their joint political ambitions. In Mtsensk, she is something else entirely. A metaphor for Stalin, murdering her way through the inconvenient family members – and eventually, strangers who get in her way. 

This Graham Vick production, which uses a David Pountney libretto in English, for some reason spiced up with gratuitous expletives, is a waste of a stellar cast. It misses Shostakovich’s point at so many levels. So, off to my Room 101, it goes. 

Birmingham’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was a compelling spectacle in many ways. But it was a different and more subtly delivered masterpiece that attracted Stalin’s evil eye in 1936.