"Bleak" and "devastating" are two words you wouldn't expect to use describing a great evening's theatre yet the opening production of the English National Opera's (ENO) new season is all three of those things.It's a harsh, uncompromisimg score that seldom gives you the satisfaction of a melody. The huge ENO orchestra, so big it spills out of the pit and has to be accommodated in the theatre boxes at the side of the stage, grinds, blasts and shrieks away and the result is a powerful evocation of mental suffering in a brutal, uncaring world.
The story has very little to do with the Shakespeare play except that at it's heart is a woman driven to desperation, degradation and evil by the actions of the men around her and the dictates of her heart.
Patricia Racette triumphs in this title role of Katerina who escapes from a terrible marriage via an affair with the local bad boy. The desperate measures the pair then take to ensure their survival encompass multiple murder, deceipt and betrayal. Even love is nothing to celebrate here, it's cruel and uncompromising and the men in her life use and abuse her, themselves locked in a battle for survival in a society where women are afforded little respect and valued only as baby machines or trash to be raped or bartered.
When the opera opens Katerina is the desperate second wife of a factory owner and a virtual prisoner of his brutal family who expect her to bare children even though the husband was unable to father a child from his first marriage of twenty years. Of course the father-in-law believes it to be the women's fault.
The factory workers are course and cruel and a new emplyee is celebrated for his history of seducing any woman he wants. When Katerina intervenes to halt a gang rape he falls for her and stops at nothing to satisfy his desire, both for her body and the power a marriage with the bosses widow might bring. Together they murder her first husband, and his father and take control of the factory before a corrupt and vicious police force stumble across the crime and send them to Siberia where more betrayal and murder is necesary to survive.
The production's Russian Director and designer Dmitri Tcherniakov denies us the romantactism a historical setting might bring and stages the whole thing in an unlovely, unadorned, bleak, modern factory where the workers swarm like wasps around a carpeted box were their mistress is kept prisoner. After the interval the killers are imprisoned in an even smaller cell where their desperate deeds lose the epic scale the huge factory affords and disintegrate into the viscious scrabbling of rats in a sack. The only loveliness comes from our heroine's reflections on her bottomless despair which, in a heart stopping aria, she compares to a dark and angry lake of water, deep within a forest.
You won't find a more powerful piece of theatre in London
As you'll have deduced this isn't an evening that's comfortable to watch or listen to; every one is dislikable, there's no heroics, just ruthless acts of desperation.
Several people left at the interval but if you embrace and lose yourself in the pitch black of these character's awful existence you really can peer into the abyss of human nature, emerging emotionally bruised but with renewed belief in love and compassion as the only way to prevent humanity descending into the hell depicted in this opera.
The production marks the ENO debut of their new Music Director, Mark Wigglesworth who draws extraordinary powerful performances from the supeb cast and orchestra.
Not for the fainthearted then, and definitely not a good show for a first date! but if you're interested in the way art can show you the darkness of existence from the comfort of a theatre seat then you won't find a more powerful piece of theatre in London.
The West End is always full of shows closing, some departures are barely noticed, some deserve to close but Shaftesbury Avenue is going to be poorer when THE COMMITMENTS finishes its two year at the Palace Theatre on November 1st where it’s played more than 1,000 performances since it originally opened on October 8, 2013.