Lady killer

‘Kiss me, Sergei! Kiss me hard! Kiss me until the icons fall and split!’ sings Katerina Ismailova, adulterous antiheroine of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Stalin was not amused by Shostakovich’s bleak black comedy but our culture would be poorer without bored wives like Katerina. Perhaps all that Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina and Laura Jesson needed was a proper kiss — the sort that mutes the white noise of disappointment. But a kiss is never enough in these cautionary tales of bourgeois bed-hopping. One thing leads to another and before you know it you’re knocking back the arsenic, throwing yourself in front of a train or back home listening to the wireless with poor dear Fred, a man whose kisses were never that hot.

Where Emma, Anna and Laura hedge and idle, Katerina hurtles headlong into lust, disgrace and murder. She is, in both senses, a fast woman. Yet the striking thing about her in Dmitri Tcherniakov’s English National Opera production is her stillness — a stillness mirrored in conductor Mark Wigglesworth’s symphonic reading of a score blistered with frenzied dances.