2023-05-05 20:00:14
A zigzag exterior staircase – like the gait of the vodka drinkers who populate it – separating the two parts of a dilapidated building, no doubt inherited from the communist era, whose three levels are stacked. On the garden side, apartments open onto the void, frugally furnished with minimal sanitary facilities. Courtyard side, gray walls and windows. We lean on it to watch the Volga flowing invisibly. The passage that serves as a playground for the children has an old turnstile. In this universe of gloom and cruelty lives Katia Kabanova. The young woman married the heir of a rich family of merchants, whose matriarch, Kabanicha, cantankerous and sadistic, likes to dominate her son, Tikhon, but even more to humiliate her daughter-in-law, whose nature she suspects. eminently rebellious and exalted.
Presented until May 13 on the stage of the Opéra national de Lyon, Katia Kabanova, by Janacek is, as always with the Czech composer, an opera for women. They are the ones who lead the dance. If the tyrannical Kabanicha seems to hold her world, the young and fiery Varvara, whom she has adopted, will know how to steal the key to the garden from her to join her lover, Koudriach, while she will encourage Katia, as soon as her husband has left on a trip, to succumb nightly to her guilty passion for the seductive Boris, whose gaze has not left her since he saw her praying in church with luminous fervor.
Between characters à la Krzysztof Warlikowski (the proletarian clothes of the Eastern countries of the 1960s) and sets à la Katie Mitchell (the cutting of pieces in space), the Polish director Barbara Wysocka paints a singular portrait of a woman, giving the heroine of the play by Alexander Ostrovsky The stormfrom which Janacek drew his libretto, a destiny more contemporary than that of the woman victim of patriarchal conventions, reduced to death for having broken them.
Magnetic stage presence
It is indeed in full awareness of her freedom that Katia the adulteress will choose to throw herself into the Volga. A feminist vision that somehow rounds off the sacrificial angles of the drama, stripping the opera of much of its tragic aura, but infusing it with a strength and a kind of transcendent vitality, which the “resurrection” of the young dead woman at the end of the opera.
The directing of actors, lively and very embodied, captures each character in all its human complexity. From drinking on all floors to the brief erotic rendezvous between Kabanicha and his male double, the old and irascible Dikoi, through videos attesting to Katia’s mental shift – barefoot as a young girl walking on the edge of the void – or this sudden upsurge of nature within the mineral, waves of ivy growing along the concrete walls.
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