The Adventures of Mr Broucek

Scottish Opera's latest effort, Janacek's The Adventures of Mr Broucek, is a bizarre and beautiful headspin. In a Gulliver's Travels-meets-The Wizard of Oz-meets-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas style adventure story, we see our hero ascend through the heavens to the moon, and crawl underground into the distant past. These unusual backdrops to the action are punctuated by the opera's singularly odd protagonist: Broucek is distinctly unlikeable character: a bourgeoisie cartoon of a man who is cowardly, lecherous and not in the least mindful of the Prime Directive.

Gelling all these disparate elements of social satire, modernist fairytale, sci-fi adventure and period drama is Janacek's intelligently constructed score. The music blasts the narrative onward by following the drama closely; there is a distinct dismissal of big showstopping numbers and constant thematic refrains. This, combined with the rhythmic echoes of the Czech language (even though the piece was sung in English) goes to make for a compelling sound-world that immerses the spectator in the centre of the drama.

While in Janacek's Jenufa this is a painful emotional experience, in Mr Broucek you nigh on lose your mind. Despite this, Mr Broucek also manages to play itself out as a very funny piece of comic theatre. Comedic timing is notoriously difficult to pull off alongside the demands of the singing, acting and choreography, and more often than not it just doesn’t gel at all with the operatic form. In this instance, however, there were a good number of sincere belly-laughs throughout, induced from the playful manner in which the cast genuinely seemed to enjoy the performance, reveling in the dramatic absurdity that the work is so rich in.

The multimedia staging was excellent at conjuring up the wildly different landscapes that the text demands, and even more so at underscoring it's alternately dreamlike and nightmarish characteristics. The principal cast morphed with ease through their past, present and alien characters. Anne Sophie Duprels shone in particular with her extremely beautiful soprano, and John Graham-Hall captured Broucek's essence perfectly, making us hate him, excuse him and love him in rapid turns.