From Russia with Ismailova

Friday evening in The Factory on Dublin's Barrow Street. And as the rest of the city endeavours to extricate itself from the Pearse Street gridlock, the chorus and principals of Opera Ireland's forthcoming production of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk are learning how to wrap a corpse in a winding sheet without leaving unsightly gaps or dangly bits. As the funeral procession is busy exiting stage right, an enormous double bed trundles in from the left, followed by a diminutive blonde soprano who is clutching her head in mock despair. "What? I'm supposed to be in the bed?" She legs it after the moving matrimonial, flings herself at it, and drapes herself across the pillows in a manner that definitely does not suggest a demure night's slumber. From winding sheets to the wrong side of the sheets: that's Lady Macbeth for you, and the Welsh soprano Helen Field is hurling herself into the role with a vengeance. When, a couple of minutes later, the director calls a rehearsal break, she hurls herself at The Irish Times instead. "An hour? Oh, no, we haven't got an hour," she protests. "I'm really sorry about this but I've got a coaching session before the next rehearsal and that's in about 10 minutes from now. It's just frantic. I haven't stopped all week. I go out at nine o'clock in the morning and I come back at 10 o'clock at night. And I've been flooded at home in Cardiff as well - and my daughter's got flu."

Has she sung the role of Lady Macbeth before? "No. But it's something I've always wanted to do, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn it in Russian. And this is a very good production, I must say - it's just a very long opera, and so it's very pressurised, because we haven't got much rehearsal time. Anyway. We're pulling out all the stops." Slight understatement. Most of us would be defeated by the task of learning a few simple phrases in Russian, let alone an entire opera - let alone the lead role in an opera in which the heroine is on stage pretty much the whole time. How on earth did she do it? "I spent all my summer holidays with a score in my hand - to my family's annoyance. But it's the only way. Just remembering it; simply remembering it . . ." She shudders. "Russian is very difficult. It's such a different language to English. You just have to learn it phonetically, mostly. I wish I spoke it fluently - but the Russian singers in the cast are a great help, and of course I've had the help of Ljuba, the Russian coach." Mention of the Russian coach - the brilliant repetiteur Ljuba Orefnova, a familiar figure at Wexford Festival Opera, is seated at a piano not 10 yards away - reminds The Irish Times that time is of the essence. So what's next? Oh, yes. Sex and violence. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which was premiered in 1934, contains large helpings of both. The story concerns one Katerina Ismailova, whose affair with one of her husband's labourers, Sergei, leads her to murder, first her father-in-law, then her husband and, finally, herself. Shostakovich didn't spare his audience the gory details - and for the first year of its existence the searing, intense opera, with its scathing critiques of the bourgeoisie, the church, the police, the education system, and just about every aspect of social realist life went down extremely well with punters, both inside the Soviet Union and abroad. In December 1935, however, one Josef Stalin queued up and got a ticket - and walked out before the final act.

Within a month, Lady Macbeth was denounced by an editorial in Pravda as "muddle instead of music", and attacked both for its "grinding and screaming" and the way in which, according to Pravda, "love is smeared all over the opera in the most vulgar manner". The piece was instantly withdrawn, and didn't reappear until the more liberal 1960s, when Shostakovich produced a watered-down version under the title Katerina Ismailova. This in turn has been discarded and on November 19th, Irish opera-goers will be treated to the power and beauty of the original work when Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk gets its Irish premiere. The Shostakovich is eagerly awaited here following last year's superb Opera Ireland staging of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov - but is Lady Macbeth still a shocker? What about those graphic love scenes between Katerina and the earthy Sergei, for example? "Hmm, well, I worried about that a little bit," says Field, "but now I've done it I realise it's not a problem at all. There's no use having inhibitions - you've just got to get on with it. There have been a few hilarious moments, though. I've fallen off the bed a few times.

"The thing is, she's an ordinary urban housewife . . .yes, she is . . . and she'd probably have gone all through her life being bored and frustrated if this peasant hadn't happened to come along - he is a peasant really - and he just unlocks her and there's no going back. She murders one, she murders another, and then she can't stop. Actually it could happen to anybody. She's just a victim of circumstances, really. We all have it in us to be unfaithful, to be violent, even to murder, so . . ." She grins an Artful Dodger grin. "It's a lesson, innit?"

Field served her time with smaller roles at Welsh National Opera and Opera North before moving to bigger parts with Scottish Opera, English National Opera and Glyndebourne. In recent times, she has grown used to playing characters at the more forceful end of the operatic spectrum, Salome being a particular favourite. Was that a deliberate career move, or it just the way things have worked out? "It's the music more than anything," she says. "It's what suits your voice - and your personality, I suppose. I've never been one to sing the fey ladies. I couldn't sing Donizetti heroines to save my life. I like German music very much; I do Aithra, from Strauss's Die Aegyptische Helena, she's a sorceress, and I do Salome everywhere - good for the voice, and I do enjoy cutting people's heads off. Horrible, isn't it? I'd like to do some Wagner if I could. I don't care what. Just to be in it."

As for her impressions of Opera Ireland: "I'm really impressed by this company, and I hope one day it can be a full-time company because I think it's a shame that Ireland hasn't got that. I was actually shocked to find the standard so high here; I've been to most big opera companies, and the standard here is comparable. As a stranger coming in, you see that. And you see how ridiculous it is that people aren't supported in the way they should be. Let's hope some big sponsor out there gets inspired."

Opera Ireland's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, sung in Russian with English surtitles, opens at the Gaiety Theatre tomorrow at 7.30 p.m.