Royal Opera House, LondonUninterested in the original story, the director stages the composer’s biography instead – leaving a big hole at the centre of this productionExperiencing the Royal Opera’s new Queen of Spades is like trying to watch a fireworks display stuck behind a tall person filming it on their mobile. The noise is tremendous; so are the sights, but you can see them only through someone else’s lens. The man with the phone in this scenario is director Stefan Herheim, and his lavish production, which baffled and excited audiences in Amsterdam in 2016, is an intelligent, compassionate, stimulating frustration.Herheim, director of last season’s Vêpres Siciliennes, here is not half as interested in the story of Pushkin’s novella and Tchaikovsky’s opera as he is in the story of Tchaikovsky himself. In fact, forget Pushkin; this is all about Tchaikovsky. The composer was the toast of musical Russia; he was also a depressive, a gay man who had a breakdown following a disastrous marriage, someone who could plausibly have drunk the cholera-infected water that killed him in full awareness that it was contaminated. Knowledge of all this is crucial to understanding the next three hours on stage, and Herheim concedes us a few projected lines of explanation at the very start. Continue reading…
Via: The Queen of Spades review – Herheim puts Tchaikovsky centre stage for stimulating frustration
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