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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Martin Kettle

The Cunning Little Vixen review – colourful staging takes Janáček’s opera to the dark side

Laughs as well as poignancy: Sally Matthews (Vixen), Lauren Morris (Hen) and Clive Bayley (Badger) in Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen at the London Coliseum.
Laughs as well as poignancy: Sally Matthews (Vixen), Lauren Morris (Hen) and Clive Bayley (Badger) in Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen at the London Coliseum. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Storms blew away last week’s planned premiere of English National Opera’s new version of Janáček’s 1924 hymn to the cycles of the living world. The opening was quickly rescheduled for Sunday afternoon, but it was a useful reminder that our coexistence in nature has a pitiless side, as well as the pantheistic charge that fires Janáček’s ecstatic score.

Jamie Manton’s busy staging is fuelled by anguish not sentiment. The composer set his opera in a Moravian forest, where a woodman captures a young vixen, who escapes back to the wild to raise a brood of cubs, only to fall victim to a hunter from the village. But Tom Scutt’s designs, fiercely lit by Lucy Carter, give us instead a deforested landscape, blasted by logging, in which the rhythms of life play out against a backdrop scroll that unwinds a visual representation of the story to reveal a chillingly blank sheet at the close.

Claire Barnett-Jones (Dog) and Sally Matthews (Vixen) in The Cunning Little Vixen, ENO February 2022
Making a mark: Claire Barnett-Jones as the Dog with Sally Matthews as the Vixen. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

All the same, there is abundance of colourful life on stage too, with all the insects, birds, mushrooms and animals that make any staging of Janáček’s opera, including this one, by turns a delight and a risk. Jenny Ogilvie’s movement direction gets laughs as well as poignancy from a menagerie in which Joy Constantinides’s dragonfly, Clare Barnett-Jones’s dog, John Findon’s cockerel and Robert Berry-Roe’s frog all make their mark. There are fox cubs and hens in profusion, while hooded “timekeepers” shift the scenery and provide a constant reminder of the opera’s dark side.

Lester Lynch as the Forester in The Cunning Little Vixen at the London Coliseum.
Richly toned: Lester Lynch as the Forester. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Martyn Brabbins conducts industriously but in a rather generalised sweep. Sally Matthews brings vocal allure to the Vixen that enables her to convey the opera’s transcendent qualities. She is well matched by the brighter soprano of Pumeza Matshikiza’s Fox. Lester Lynch’s Forester is richly toned and sympathetic in his getting of wisdom, but articulation, especially important in this opera, is not a strong point for any of them. Ossian Huskinson, who makes an impressive impact as the poacher Harašta is, by contrast, exemplarily clear. So are the experienced pairing of Alan Oke and Clive Bayley, who capture the important dramatic counterpoint of the unfulfilled lives of the village schoolmaster and priest.

Until 1 March

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