Trivial brilliance

Each time I see Shostakovich’s once controversial opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk I am impressed by what brilliant performances it seems to incite, fascinated by it dramatically and musically, but left unsatisfied by its unevenness and what I think is finally its incoherence. As far as productions go, it is hard to imagine that any could be more compelling than Richard Jones’s at the Royal Opera, and what is amazing is that it has improved considerably since its triumphant first run in 2004. There are probably very few operas which so suit Jones’s temperament, offering him every opportunity to juxtapose the hideous and the tender, the grotesque and the painful, high spirits and terminal torpor. When he doesn’t find these and other ingredients, he mercilessly throws them in anyway, as he did most notably in the Ring. He has no taste for the sublime or the beautiful, and in Lady Macbeth there is no room for either. In John Macfarlane, his designer, he has a perfectly kindred spirit. The dividing of the set into two halves for the first two acts — one where Katerina sits and mopes, or makes love, or helps her lover to axe her husband; the other the ‘public’ space, which is nonetheless claustrophobically enclosed — and the consequent traffic between the two, no more logical in the production than in the opera, but still highly effective, makes possible a range of Jonesian images and actions which leave the audience laughing with extreme unease, in general wondering how they should respond when it seems their sympathies are being tugged in exactly the opposite way to what they, we, are used to or would anticipate.