The Cunning Little Vixen
Lime Tree Theatre, Limerick
★★★★☆
Opera composers will take stories from anywhere – literature, history, the Bible, folklore, fairy tales, mythology. For The Cunning Little Vixen, his 1923 opera, Leos Janacek’s original source was a daily comic-strip series that appeared in a Brno newspaper.
According to the Janaceks’ servant of more than 40 years, the great Czech composer only discovered the cartoons when he overheard her laughing at them in the kitchen one day.
They were simple line drawings depicting the comic adventures of woodland creatures and a few humans. Janacek retained the humour but expanded and deepened the story, reflecting on themes including love, loneliness, life, death and renewal. It was his seventh opera, and he was in his late 60s when he wrote it.
The cast of characters is dominated by animals. Sophie Motley, the director of this Irish National Opera production, and her costume designer, Saileóg O’Halloran, create these characters in playful, vividly coloured costumes, including feathers, (zoologically dodgy) tails and, for the mosquito, a spectacular proboscis.
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The choreographer Emily Terndrup ensures that animal characterisation is further – and delightfully – enhanced through movement, above all in the comical twitching and stamp-stepping of the ill-fated hens. (Could those singers have known that they would one day receive expert training in this when they first started going to singing lessons?)
Part of Motley’s brief for this touring production is to find strategies for maximising smaller performance spaces. Her solution is to evoke the forest setting and some of the action by judiciously blending Maree Kearns’s simple but versatile set designs with beautiful, silhouette-style animations by the projection designer Neil O’Driscoll. No problem suspending disbelief.
Space constraints also affect the music. Smaller regional theatres have no pit and no space for an orchestra, so the full breadth and colour of Janacek’s wonderful score must be sacrificed in order to take the show on the road. Fair deal. Still, everything in the original is either reproduced in miniature or alluded to in the faithful reduction for 13 players by Jonathan Lyness.
The conductor Charlotte Corderoy accompanies the storytelling with precise and energetic direction of her ensemble – positioned between the stage and the first row of seats – although here and there she seems to default to a bigger, orchestral conception, with the result that voices in the higher register are sometimes masked.
For me the voice leaving the most lasting impression is that of the baritone Benjamin Russell, as the Forester. He is the man who initially captures the titular vixen as a cub, later sees her escape after she kills all his hens, and at the end encounters one of her cubs. The Forester steers our journey through the opera’s very human themes, and Russell is able to put his firm and richly understated voice at the service of the role’s diverse emotional range.
The soprano Amber Norelai is a charismatic Little Vixen, leading an animal cast performed with untiring and playful energy by singers mostly switching between two and sometimes three roles. Special mention for the two, very game teen actors – three roles each – Ceola Roy and Ethan O’Connor.
With this touring production Irish National Opera has turned challenge into advantage by animating The Cunning Little Vixen’s fun and seriousness in equal measure, with a staging full of energy and invention and good performances. As a result, the reflective presence of Janacek’s deep universal themes are sustained throughout.
The Cunning Little Vixen is touring until Sunday, February 22nd, with performances in Galway, Sligo, Letterkenny, Navan and Dún Laoghaire
