Production evokes cell block horrors

FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD - Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre

By CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.,
National Post

Prison life in Leos Janacek's From the House of the Dead is nasty like a Danny Boyle splatter flick. Giving a gulag orchestral accompaniment seems too beautiful for such an existence. But the limitations of opera's dramaturgy and its inability to capture grotesque brutality don't hinder this production.

All the gore is psychological, and the Canadian Opera Company has found the unique greatness of this opera through candid and meaningful spectacle.

Adapted from Dostoevsky's 1860 novel, this realization of House isn't a story but rather a pastiche of scenes from inside a czarist prison. It begins with the pretense of a standard tale, though, as an "aristocrat" (pre-Soviet code for a political prisoner) is being incarcerated, forced to survive a rough and classless Dungeon for Men. In most cases, opera about jail should be dull; movies and novels evoke rape and murder better. Opera can't be actually violent, so what kind of fresh experience does this composer offer us?
Janacek, a Czech who died while writing this opera in 1928, penetrates the jumpy narrative of despair. His ability to push further into the character's emotional landscape creates some uniquely evil scenes, such as when a prisoner describes aloud how and why his killed his wife. As his yarn unfolds, music underpins every flash of the speaker's giddiness, dread, rage, shame, hatred, lust, more giddiness and so on, until the vividness of his guilt is like hands on your body.

This is done with music that remains exquisite and accessibly tonal, no matter how edgy or twisted the material gets. His sound is no more dissonant than Strauss's. Its melodies are modeled on natural speech patterns while the music builds and builds the subtext through gorgeous orchestrations capable of representing infinite varieties of psychic hue.

It's important to understand how much nourishment Janacek offers this genre, which is losing its canonic composers faster than they're being replaced. Nobody's stepping in for Donizetti or Rameau, who have more or less lost our interest. And Berg's still too demanding, though Janacek's about as smart.

Director Dmitri Bertman seems to have worked hard to not overthink his response to House's non-linear stream of cell block horror shows. The production would be highbrow camp if it weren't evoking such powerful and subtle material. It opens with a fancy dinner being served to the Commandant of a Siberian stockade where the personnel all dress in what appear to be Italian military whites. The big guy falls asleep while eating alone, looking satisfied, while his splendid table is overrun by dozens of men with shaved heads, all clad in blue prisoner apparel. They move like rats and sing nifty choral bits among the churning gloom.

Overhead, in the near background, guards follow the proceedings. They sit in shadows, watching video monitors. These desk bound wardens don't do anything about the feeding, quarreling inmates.

Meanwhile, underneath the main stage are more men, packed together unhappily in cages, sometimes squeezing their fingers through the grillwork in the stage's floor, creating a lawn of wiggling digits. There are orgies, murders, ghastly chorus lines and impromptu variety shows that are satirically happy as the men are insane without freedom, without the presence of women. A brief appearance by a female, a solitary soprano who's soon sucked into the plot's fray of mischief and casual death, makes it clear how soul crushing such environments are. And because of the common blue costuming, it's difficult to tell apart members of this opera's enormous cast. Such anonymity only adds to the oppressiveness.

This production shows how both Arthur Koestler and Franz Kafka drew so much inspiration from Dostoevsky. It's rotten with confinement and modern anguish, like Darkness at Noon, yet the implicit dumbness pervading the penitentiary has a comic bleakness similar to The Trial. The COC has clearly nailed the text's political ambiance by not being just another statement against tyranny. Janacek's House delivers a rare lesson in music's real power, x-raying the human spirit and categorizing its limits. - From the House of the Dead runs Feb. 2, 5, 7, 13, 19 and 22 at 7:30 p.m.; Feb. 16 at 4:30 p.m.; and Feb. 10 at 2 p.m. For information call 416-363-8231.

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