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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Shaun Walker in Amsterdam

‘It’s about self-destruction’: director Serebrennikov on his bleak operatic vision of Russia

Opera singers dressed a Russian police raid one one on-stage apartments
Serebrennikov pulls the action of Mussorgsky’s opera into the present day with references to the Putin’s regime and the Ukraine war. Photograph: borggreve/Dutch National Opera/Marco Borggreve

On the stage of the Amsterdam opera house, a Soviet-era block of flats is sliced open in a cross-section. In almost every apartment, a television set shows images of crowds at a rally, cheering a vast Russian flag emblazoned with the Z pro-war symbol.

Meanwhile, police bang on the doors looking for dissidents, while another big screen on the stage shows very different images, evocative and melancholic photographs of provincial Russia. As the lights go down at the end of the performance, the final image is of a van in a lonely parking lot, a coffin loaded into the back.

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