The Cunning Little Vixen

The last few weeks have seen performances of the latest collaboration between Scottish Opera and the RSAMD: Janácek's The Cunning Little Vixen.

Written late in Janácek's life, this opera is a complex affair full of underlying tension and dramatic subtlety. As such, it proves a difficult piece for a company to master, requiring a balance of psychological strangeness and fairytale warmth: Janácek's mythic-pastoral setting is fraught with investigations of the very real concepts of sex, politics and death.

Ideally, the beautiful and harsh realities of life should be brought into sharp focus by their juxtaposition with this false sense of Arcadia. The trouble lies with the temptation for the company to focus on the benign aspects of the drama: there are many elements which can be twisted to achieve a vaguely amusing and middle of the road production which deals in the currency of entertainment rather than art.

David Poutney’s production is guilty of this, revelling all too often in a sense of pantomime that obscures the work’s complex psychological nature. Through a combination of questionable costumes and highly stylised performance technique, it becomes impossible to see the opera’s dark ambiguities.

It is for this same reason that Maria Bjornson’s sets feel slightly strange, despite their obvious success at what they attempt; indeed, the stage is dressed in a charming and innovative way. However, depicting nature as a patchwork quilt strewn with cushions and sheets seems distinctly at odds with the opera’s depiction of nature as brutally unforgiving and cruelly random, though never anything less than glorious in its inexhaustible force of life.

The orchestra sounded proficient, and Timothy Dean did a fine job in constructing a sense of continuous narrative from Janácek's idiosyncratic sound world. Despite dynamic restraint from the pit, many of the singer’s voices had difficulty reaching the back of the grand circle. The dancing was of a more consistent quality, and the combination of ballet and puppetry was hugely effective in creating a sense of dreamlike strangeness.

However, in bringing out the cosy elements of this opera, the production has cheapened and lessened it considerably. It makes for an enjoyable evening out at the theatre to chuckle and coo at, but is for the most part an unaffecting and forgettable version of a work that should shake and unsettle its audience instead of pandering to their sentimentalities.