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Rusalka, Royal Opera House 2012
Deliberately designed to provoke? … Anna Devin, Justina Gringytre and Madeleine Pierard as the Wood Nymphs in Rusalka at the Royal Opera House. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
Deliberately designed to provoke? … Anna Devin, Justina Gringytre and Madeleine Pierard as the Wood Nymphs in Rusalka at the Royal Opera House. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Royal Opera House's Rusalka is ugly, but not radical

This article is more than 12 years old
Andrew Clements
Boos greeted the first night of the production of Rusalka at Covent Garden; it fared little better on its Salzburg premiere in 2008

Perhaps I've led a sheltered life, but it wasn't until the third act of the Royal Opera's Rusalka that the penny finally dropped, and I realised that Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito's production really was set in a brothel. But perhaps the first-night Covent Garden audience has been a bit sheltered too, operatically at least – by the standards of contemporary opera production this is by no means a radical show.

Rusalka, Royal Opera House, 2012
Camilla Nylund (Rusalka) and giant tomcat. Photo: Tristram Kenton

It is, though, a quite remarkably ugly one and some aspects of it – the witch Ježibaba's giant tomcat who effects Rusalka's transformation from water nymph to human, helping himself to a quick shag while doing so; the kitchen boy who is taken roughly from behind while disembowelling a white deer; Rusalka's bloody suicide in the final scene – do seem deliberately designed to provoke. Covent Garden's regular patrons may not be as notoriously conservative as those of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but even for them, it seems, there are lines that cannot be crossed.

Had the production been staged by English National Opera or any other British company it surely wouldn't have attracted the outrage that's been generated since Monday's first night, (would Christopher Alden's 50s-secondary school A Midsummer Night's Dream for ENO last year have been tolerated at Covent Garden?) but instead just dismissed as an unfortunate miscalculation, and an opportunity squandered. For sheer brainless inanity, for instance, Welsh National Opera's Cosi Fan Tutte last year left this Rusalka far behind.

What makes the Royal Opera's decision to present this production of Rusalka less excusable, though, is the fact that the show was not new at all. Its reception at Salzburg in 2008 ought to have given someone at the ROH pause for thought at least, and even if the cast had already been booked, there would have been plenty of time to abandon plans to bring it to London and to commission a brand-new production from another director.

In one sense, though Weiler and Morabito are right. The continuing potency of any fairytale lies in its psychological relevance, and cosy naturalistic settings of operas based upon them can be very bland. The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim's Freudian analysis of fairytales published in the mid 1970s, became a bible for opera directors in the following decade, and it certainly lay behind David Pountney's famous 1983 ENO staging of Rusalka, which took just as many liberties with the original setting of Dvorák's fairytale as Covent Garden's has. But in Stefan Lazaridis's set of an Edwardian nursery in dreamscape white, it all looked ravishing, the last thing this new production certainly will be accused of.

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