Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, opera review: Murderous tale hits the high notes

This production is a triumphant debut for Mark Wigglesworth, says Barry Millington
Slow-burning revenge: Patricia Racette as Katerina with John Daszak as her lover Sergei
Clive Barda
Barry Millington28 September 2015

The landmark 1987 production of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by David Pountney and Stefanos Laziridis, with its unforgettable abattoir and bloody carcasses, Red Army guards and Busby Berkeley-style production numbers, brilliantly captured the opera’s fusion of pathos and parody. Nearly 30 years on from the glory days of the ENO Powerhouse, the company has mounted the production of the Russian director Dmitri Tcherniakov, first seen at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in 2008.

Tcherniakov’s more austere approach scales back the farcical elements without always adequately filling the gap. Tcherniakov’s own industrial set is a contemporary but ramshackle office floor, the workers at computer terminals. The Ismailov’s family business isn’t unduly taxed with health and safety regulations, one assumes. Nor with sexual harassment legislation.

Adjacent to the office is an occluded domestic space where Katerina, the much-abused merchant’s wife, suffering from soul-destroying ennui and lack of sexual or emotional fulfilment, is confined. She occasionally leaves her cell, only to be sexually humiliated by her bullying father-in-law Boris (formidably sung by Robert Hayward), the owner of the business. When Katerina spikes his mushrooms with rat poison, it’s difficult not to feel that she has performed a public service. And indeed Shostakovich wanted us to empathise with her, despite her murderous tendencies (she subsequently helps to dispatch her husband, Zinovy — the excellent Peter Hoare — and a fellow prisoner too). By depicting the oppressive social situation that provokes her actions, Tcherniakov enters an extenuating plea for her crimes. Yet elsewhere there’s little sentimentality. The beating of Katerina’s lover Sergei (lustily sung by John Daszak), for example, is carried out not by Boris but by the workers themselves.

The last act is set not on the road to Siberia but in a prison cell — the metaphor of Katerina’s confinement becoming grim reality. The final humiliation by her cellmate Sonyetka is thus played out under her nose — a fate as merciless as the striplight above. Patricia Racette incarnates Tcherniakov’s conception of Lady Macbeth admirably. She’s less the sassy, man-eating anti-heroine of tradition than a long-suffering victim of male abuse whose slow-burning revenge brings her not release but the torments of guilt. Racette’s measured voicing and acting of the role explores the character’s interior feelings rather than her brazen façade.

If the satirical elements are played down in the production, they are both registered and integrated wholly convincingly into Shostakovich’s virtuoso score by Mark Wigglesworth, for whom the orchestra plays superlatively. For Wigglesworth it’s a triumphant debut as music director of ENO.

Until October 20 (020 7845 9300, eno.org)

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