Katya is sliding away

Jun 16 2007 Thomas Hall, The Journal

It's been a couple of years since Opera North brought director Tim Albery's work to Newcastle. Last time it was his stylish and racy production of One Touch of Venus, Kurt Weill's tale of fast-talking New Yorkers - a real laugh-a-minute.

But give him the same subject of sexual infidelity within the stifling confines of 19th Century Russian bourgeois society and Albery puts on his serious hat, exposing human frailities in a compelling take on Janácek's Katya Kabanova.

Trapped in the matriarchal Kabanova household by marriage, Katya once found release in religious fantasy but now fears she will give in to her longing for more earthbound consolations and, when her ineffectual husband, Tichon, is ordered off on a business trip, in walks Boris.

Wracked by guilt, Katya begins her slide towards a self-chosen watery grave in the Volga.

Company regular Giselle Allen sings and acts the passions and pathos of Katya's torn soul with gripping realism, Peter Wedd's Boris is her equally convincing emotionally storm-tossed lover.

Sally Burgess brings a cool, forbidding severity to mother-in-law Kabanicha. while Boris's guardian Dikoy, in Stephen Richardson's portrayal, is an explosion of drunken violence waiting to happen.

Richard Farnes and the orchestra paint each scene with kaleidoscopic colours.