Dmitri Shostakovitch/David Radok: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Ivan Vojtěch)

Nor do models pertinent to earlier literary naturalism deny the expressiveness of this step. A compositional reading shifts them to deeper positions, through which the variously designated tragic sense of life in the modern age, experience both direct and historical, forces its way into the dramaturgy. Thanks to it, stories clash with timeless myth and experience the break-up of traditional dramatic teleology. The obligatory horizon is now compacted and austere, inexorable in the upswing of damage and destruction, made taut by the simultaneous extreme two-foldedness of the cosmic and human order, with the accent on the topicality of temporality and loneliness. The tragic catastrophe means sinking down to first origins; its gesture is the gesture of a closed circle, in a highly concentrated and absolute unconditionality.

From the beginning, Shostakovich’s thinking in drama – thanks to the diabolically fantastic capability of the self-evident contact of ear and eye with actually-happening reality – was shaped as a polyphonic mode. It passed through the school of Meyerhold. Modern Russian theatre developed processes of stage counterpoint from the principles of musical phrases, at the same time investigating the other face of the grotesque, in which nothingness is directed into mutual positions with the tragic. Whatever the origin of the mediating elements, there is no doubt that the original strength of Radok’s reading of Shostakovich relies on this awareness; it is, at the end of the century, a phenomenon characteristic of European dramatic culture.

If we trace the nature of directorial sensibility, we can see that it always involves newly composing the fundamental shaping of the work, not simply from roots which can be indicated rationally, but more from a person’s attraction to quite specific malleable phenomena capable of handling the weight of the consolidating focal point.

From this point of view, the key to Radok’s reading is KATORGA (forced labour): prisoners in exile, isolation from the world in endless hopelessness with the additional burden of journeys without paths, homelessness as part of the human sojourn, homelessness both in one’s innermost self and in society, a synonym for a bleak world as bleak as existence itself. KATORGA also means watching and being watched, surveillance and spying, the power of those above the law and of malice, of humiliating bullying and of wounding force.

That word (katorga) is touched on in the opening aria of Shostakovich’s opera and the first scene adds to it for the first time a cruel subjectivity, remaining stable as the steady cantus firmus of every conflict open and hidden, lyrical, grotesque, horrific, sadistic, intimate and orgiastic: KATORGA assesses the individual and the crowd, the master and the slave; it is the crucial bond between man and woman, family, community and, later, human destiny as such. The finale gives it the subjectivity of the Last Things.

Radok emblematises it as a space demarcated by three walls, rising to an endless height. The space is as bare, dark and chill as a prison courtyard. Its original character remains present through all the changes brought about by the division of the action into different spaces (by more walls), regardless of whether they are close and intimate or open to width, breadth and depth.

The dark spectrum of grey-blue, with shadowy sectors and chiaroscuro moments, gives relevant human dimensions to the individual and the chorus. Filling the space consolidates the herd instinct of the crowd, emptying it isolates a person at the centre as the only adversary, itself left naked to the framework of a tragic vault. The almost total absence of concrete phenomena consigns the few chosen to the sphere of the symbol. “TABLE” and “BED” are transformed from their primitive meaning into support of lecherous aggression and violence, into a foundation of subjugating brutality. Both of them are an attribute of erotic ecstasy, of marriage celebration, but also of murder, burial, grotesque blasphemy in judgment of human and divine matters. At the end there is no room for either. There remains the unutterability of the broad earth.

Piranesi’s CARCERI have a supra-dimensional height, swallowing the insignificance of the human figure in light, hiding in luminosity staircases partitioned by bars. Radok’s space reaches up into the darkness and is clamped down in darkness. It sinks into darkness and where it all opens up, darkness shapes its contours. Its light is sharp and wounding. Merciful is the darkness of night, into which the clear rectangle of the window gently breaks; the side door opens a little, bringing another slight shift in the level of blueness. Costume is its antithesis, in a scale of shades of white.

Apart from a few specific moments the body of the central figure is in white, revealed through the everyday shift, through naked shoulders and arms, through bare feet. The bed is white, white only; white is the nightdress, white are the supreme glowing ecstasies of lovemaking. The heroine enters the catastrophe in the layered degrees of whiteness of a wedding dress. However, even this domain is split in a particular way. At key moments, Radok has a young girl in a white costume quietly cross the stage, as Katerina’s most secret idée fixe. He does this until the last moment. The dress is, maybe, a miniature wedding dress; the little figure itself does not undergo any change. It is always just as serious, just as much from another world.

It is this figure which opens Radok’s production, leading us into the stillness of the darkened stage even before the first note is heard. Tiny little steps provide a visible but unheard measure of inner time, time which is in itself still entire, and therefore capable of protecting the amorous encroachments of the finite. This is something known to modern culture from Surrealist collages, something which attaches importance to this power of a dream. A path opens from silence, darkness and rhythm to the wheel of fortune of betrothal which EROS and THANATOS govern through the fascination of the senses and carnality, through ravishing flashes of the deepest meaning of life in the freedom of the request and its fulfillment, whereby, in the unending interweaving of love and death, of eternal beginning, eternal end, man creates himself.

In this connection the quality of timing of musical configurations marks both the rhythmatisation of the stage dynamics and statics, and the type of acting, focused towards the dominant expression of the body. Mimicry is completely austere, gesture is reduced, situations are cast from the essence of the monologue of musical time with its spans. The music carries the very particular expressive concrete quality of the dramatic action, it gives the scheme a broad outline, its rhythmatisation in the dynamics and sequence of reversals, gradations and summits.

The acting, coming from the essence of fysis, complements the unfilled space, for it is in this that the dominant quality of weight, volume, robustness and lightness, flexibility and nobility, firmness and fragility, on which the expression of movement is based, is put into effect. Registers come directly into Shostakovich’s musical architecture primarily through statically formed and stabilising centres. The proportions of mutual distances between the characters give intensity and character to the supporting distance, authentic otherwise everywhere the sung word comes into play.

We have indicated what sort of an organic connection the space, its colourfulness and costume, ties to itself. The acting enters it as the most essential power of the execution on stage by thematised complexes which Radok’s imagination charges by a method music knows from variational forming. A certain set of movements belongs to costume as the visual code of a character, to which the character or the space subjects itself, or in which it looks for the hidden. The peaked cap, jodhpurs and high boots, the square-built, heavy figure of Boris, has in the monotonously stamping walk with which he measures the space of the action, more suspected dismay than is betrayed by the evil speech with which he enters. However, only from this distance can the horrible objective embodiment of violence, of physical bullying and humiliating exploitation, be expressed. The inflexibility in the straddled stance in the middle of the footlights, back to the auditorium, has its dual execution in the nocturnal sequence, governed by the relaxed flexibility of waiting wild creatures, in a scene of flagellating sadism. However, the theme of violence has been demonstrated even earlier in the orgiastic crowd collectively watching a rape. And in the finale it has the outline of a force which shoots. The director has thus slightly changed the composer’s version of the catastrophic solution, but this change has powerful reasoning in the objective, about which there can be no doubt.

A precise understanding of Radok’s directorial style can rest on the focal point in which the production solves the most complicated points of intersection knotted into development both visible and hidden, expressed both verbally and in acting without words. The composer invested this line in symphonic interludes whose visual caesuras gave him the opportunity for the application of musical imagination. For the man of the theatre, a scene played in silence is a return to a basic mode of speech, to action before the word, to acts which perceive, sample and preserve. Thus the first interlude captures the previously mentioned code of inflexible stance, the second and fourth prolong and anticipate the reverse of the action, the fifth – on the contrary – drives the action by the rapid tempo of the police crowd ahead.

However, the third interlude, set at the central point of the work as a passacaglia with twelve variations, is in its darkness overlaid with an extended memorial ceremony. The burial identifies itself in simultaneous sequences, combines the grave and the bed, and at the same time reflects the funeral procession demarcating the tragic conflict. The movement and the articulation of the space, the chiaroscuro shadows and play of darkness, excessively slowed down, and the unendingly augmented rocking movement of the chorus, encompasses the transformation to a newly created burial mound. Katerina Izmailova crosses its elevation as a simplified turning point, returning again to the rigidly statuesque initial anti-position of tragic actors. It is the only phase which deliberately monumentalises the pathos by heaping up, by a strictly guided assemblage, and still marked by the direction of chaos which is all the more apparent the sharper the economy with which Shostakovich varies the theme. Even this imagery responds to the rules of silence.

There is yet another move by which Radok develops Shostakovich’s impulse towards the silenced sphere of groups and choruses which create the milieu of the opera. Their costume changes imperceptibly, as is appropriate for a gray crowd of ordinary people. They are from the start something like animated household goods: the motionless groups hold the isolated, so to speak imperceptible, movements in an inflexibility which defies time. They create the wall, mirror and shield of the first touch of the tragic couple; then, the orgiastic arena. I have already mentioned their positioning in the final phase. It is a society in which humanity shows its inscrutable unreliability. It intervenes in everything: those, who only pass through it, those who perhaps look for shelter in it, and those who have power over it and who it now lays in the grave. The silently acting throngs are the mark of a fate from which the tragic cannot flee.

The Prague production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is David Radok’s third, following Göteburg and Copenhagen. In Klaudia Dernerová (Katerina). Serge Kunaiev (Serge) and Yevhen Shokalo (Boris) he has soloists whose outstanding acting intuition and splendid ability – with the conductor František Preisler – bring his staging to the peak of perfection.