The final production of the current Glyndebourne season is a revival of Damiano Michieletto’s staging of Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová, first seen in 2021, as the UK emerged from lockdown, with the cast socially distanced on stage and a reduced orchestration used in the pit. Now, of course, conductor Robin Ticciati reverts to Janáček’s original score. I didn’t see Michieletto’s original, however, and so cannot tell how much may have changed dramatically.
An inconsistent staging, it transforms an essentially naturalistic work into a symbolist exploration of its heroine’s mind, and an opera essentially about the darkness of the human soul, is now reimagined in antiseptic, clinical white. There’s little suggestion of the natural world that mirrors the central crisis, only a phosphorescent glare seen between the cracks of the white walls that hem Kateřina Kněžíková’s Káťa in. Michieletto is unsparing in his depiction of Kabanicha’s (Susan Bickley) abuse, yet at the same time, the social background is curiously vague here, and we lose sight of Káťa’s tragedy as emblematic of conflicts between reactionary authoritarianism and emerging liberalism.
