For a supposedly great and mighty ruler, Tsar Dodon seems a little lost. Once known for his ruthless war-making, we find him in a funk: his armour doesn’t fit any more, his shield is rusted. He stumbles around a kingdom of grey dirt and tall grass, rattling his sabre and wearing a singlet caked in grease and grime. Even from the back of Adelaide’s Festival Theatre stalls, you can almost sense the Cheeto dust down his front.
His two heirs jostle for his favour and greedily eye his crown, played by Samuel Dundas and Nicholas Jones as corporate fail-sons in slick business suits. As has become his signature, the Berlin-based Australian director Barrie Kosky has uprooted Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1907 opera from its Russian folkloric setting, and goes wherever his sense of macabre whimsy takes us.
