Prison without freedom – Weekend

At the end of September, Opernwelt magazine published its traditional ranking of opera events for the season that ended, based on a survey of several dozen critics from around the world. The first lines in this rating are occupied by Dmitry Chernyakov in the categories “director of the year” and “performance of the year” – for Prokofiev’s “War and Peace” at the Bavarian Opera. The director’s second mega-premiere, the tetralogy “The Ring of the Nibelung” at the Berlin Staatsoper, was also indirectly noted: in the “singer of the year” category, Michael Folle received the majority of votes for the role of Wotan. And in early September, when all the ratings had already been compiled, Chernyakov released “From the House of the Dead” by Leos Janacek at the Ruhrtriennale festival. The performance, whose life was obviously limited to six festival performances, is no less interesting than both colossal projects – and all together, although not a trilogy, they are not completely separate stage entities.

Text: Olga Fedyanina

What unites the three stories is that each of them takes place in a space that represents not a particular case, but the whole. During this season, Chernyakov, one might say, arranged and directed three universes. If The Ring was a world of reason and wonder, and War and Peace of history and myth, then From the House of the Dead is a world of individual disintegration and forced unity.

Written in 1927–1928 based on the novel by Dostoevsky, Janáček’s opera “From the House of the Dead” rests on a very complexly woven musical canvas and a very fragile narrative one. Between the appearance of the “political” prisoner Goryanchikov (Johan Reuther) in a Siberian prison and his final release, there are loosely connected episodes of hard labor everyday life and monologues on the topic “how we all ended up here” – a kaleidoscope of a humiliated, oppressed life in which mortal melancholy explodes wild excitement, enlightenment and rage follow each other without transition, a life in which laughter frightens and tears soothe.

The formal protagonist of this story is more of a listener and witness than a participant. We will never hear Goryanchikov’s own story, but the fact that he comes to the prison and then leaves it only emphasizes: there is no way out of here for anyone else. In the world of the living, at least. In Dostoevsky’s novel, hard labor has a beginning and an end, but in Janacek’s opera it does not; the director follows the composer and, as it turns out later, is somewhat superior to him in skepticism.

If we ignore existential complications, the metaphor of a dead house resonates very much in the history of the festival; the Ruhr Triennial, in fact, is all located in dead houses. The cross-genre festival, founded by opera intendant Gérard Mortier, was conceived to fill the post-war infrastructural void: the decline of the coal industry was gradually turning the Ruhr coal basin into an empty, depressed region. Mortier relied on the ability of contemporary art to revive absolutely any location – since 2002, the triennial has been filling mines, workshops, and hangars that have become unnecessary with all sorts of non-format art. And at the same time, it tests big names and names that are well known to the public for strength in unusual circumstances. And if within the framework of the usual opera theater both Janáček and Chernyakov can still be called, with some belatedness, “controversial” or “difficult to understand” artists, then at the Ruhr Triennial it is mainstream to be controversial and difficult to understand. People go to other places for undeniable art.

The question of the world order in these festival spaces rests on the fact that first we need to redefine the boundaries of the performance – in the most general sense.

Before The House of the Dead, Chernyakov’s most paradoxical directorial decisions did not go beyond the theater portal (with the exception of the very early Goat Island on the Small Stage of the Red Torch in Novosibirsk, but that was in the drama theater in the last millennium). The front structure of a conventional theater, like the box stage, did not seem to bother him much. And Chernyakov ironized (in a conceptual sense) over this conservative structure, while remaining inside it.

In this case, instead of the usual circumstances of the place, there is the “Hall of the Century” – a giant industrial pavilion, built in 1902 in the city of Bochum for an industrial exhibition and later converted into a gas power plant. The Chernyakov pavilion is divided into three interconnected prison courtyards: three platforms that can be seen through, along the perimeter of which three tiers of scaffolding-galleries are built – standing places for spectators. Some of the audience, according to the purchased tickets, even end up right on the playing area. The galleries filled with people are the scenography of the performance – like a fixed Hollywood mise-en-scène: the inner prison yard and the crowd spilling out of the cells, gawking at those who are rowdy somewhere down there and in the center.

The orchestra, conducted by Dennis Russell Davis, is invisibly located behind these scaffolding tiers; it does not separate the audience from the actors, but, on the contrary, unites them – the sound space between the audience and the singers is common. The light (lighting designer – Gleb Filshtinsky) works flawlessly in the openwork architecture of industrial modernity, creating stadium show effects, and some very intimate lines and playing areas, and gaps of absolute darkness and invisibility. From such a black hole, at the very beginning, a herd of men of all ages and grades – the inhabitants of a dead house – will emerge and rush towards the spectator-witnesses.

Having identified the audience as extras and arranged the space, Chernyakov assigns a seemingly unusually modest role to the direction itself in this performance. In his “House of the Dead” there are no reinvented circumstances and figures, newly constructed plot connections, or cunning motives. Gaps in Janacek’s libretto leave a lot of questions unanswered, and the director has already accustomed the audience to the fact that this kind of air can be inventively filled with details and even entire storylines. In Chernyakov’s own productions there is a lot of this ingenious work on completing and rearranging the libretto: in “The Ring,” for example, you can look at it endlessly. Nothing like this in From the House of the Dead.

In fact, the director’s work with air, with those very gaps, is done here masterfully. They are filled with glances, intonations, fleeting movements, reactions, some attacks of group and individual fantasies or fears – and these plotless, extra-plot fears, fantasies, desires transform disparate figures and stories into a single whole.

The convicts of Janáček and Dostoevsky in Chernyakov’s play are dressed in modern clothes (the costume designer is Elena Zaitseva), but “modern” in this case simply means “nothing” – the dull and untempting uniform of the suburbs, cheap eateries, and station passages. Clothes are just a sign of belonging to a community that is completely archaic, although unmistakably recognizable in the present day.

Its first and main property is that it is exclusively masculine.

Ostrog, of course, and Janáček’s work is a man’s world, but Chernyakov obviously cares about its monolithic nature, so that there is nothing left of the female half of humanity on stage, only photographs. The part of the young convict Aleya, which can be performed by either a tenor or a mezzo-soprano, is, of course, given to a male voice (Bekhzod Davronov). But the only female part, tiny, two lines long, is turned into a male, countertenor one – and a random tramp-prostitute becomes another young convict in the play (Vladislav Shkarupilo).

Men own reality here. Women exist in their fantasies and memories – as a dream, a longing and always as victims.

Memories and fantasies evoke an attack of voluptuous revival in the speakers, although they are devoted to violence, pain, and humiliation. Convict Luka Kuzmich (Stefan Rügamer) recalls how he was beaten in the previous prison: he refused to admit that the commandant “here is the king and god.” The convict Skuratov (John Daszak) tells how the girl he loved was forced to agree to marry another, rich man, and how he shot that groom. Convict Shishkov (Lee Melrose) finally brings to light the epic story of his fiancée Akulka, whom he killed because he could not share her with his rival, Filka. Filka, what a surprise, is Luka Kuzmich, who during this story is giving his soul to God, either himself or with help. Each of these roles, each of the monologues, both vocally and acting-wise, are performed impeccably – but the meaning and merit of the performance is still that the director collects them, merges them into a common event, a single musical and dramatic body.

Chernyakov’s state of Ostrog screams, dies, heart-rendingly repents, hysterically grieves, runs out of adrenaline and testosterone, does not understand any power and no arguments other than a fist in the face, and no entertainment except various forms of mesilov. Here they measure their readiness to kill and their readiness to be beaten half to death, but their faces brighten when they take out women’s photographs from their bosoms.

A few years ago, Krzysztof Warlikowski directed a very sophisticated version of From the House of the Dead, in which violence and humiliation were transmitted from top to bottom, the outcast had a clear socio-psychological structure, and everything was quite neatly Foucauldian. The prison was a place where outcasts were collected, throwing them out of some other supposedly normal life. This was very consistent with the Central European narrative logic: the inhabitants of the dead house ended up in it because they were murderers somewhere out there, in other places and circumstances. In Dmitry Chernyakov’s play there is no “somewhere out there”, memories may not be memories, but fantasies, the heroes here and now, before our eyes, live, feed on their murder and decay, need it, hold on to it. Therefore, the citizens of Ostrog don’t even really need locks on the doors and security – having come together here, they can no longer get away from each other, their unity is violent, but inseparable, and it is this unity that turns them into what they are, into hopeless garbage, causing pity, fear, and disgust.

In Chernyakov’s dead house, the community of people is a corrupted thing precisely because it is a community: hell is not others, hell is when everyone is together. The same corrupted community was the chorus in his Macbeth and The Flying Dutchman, and in From the House of the Dead, instead of a chorus, there was a flock of protagonists.

The fact that in the finale all the characters are more dead than alive, and the audience can stop feeling like their cellmates and move freely to a nearby bar, does not cancel the feeling of a universal, hopeless threat: in the finale, the director quite ruthlessly shows that freedom can turn out to be just delusional fantasy.

Chernyakov turns Goryanchikov’s farewell to prison into a nightmare, a painful dream, causing first euphoria and then mortal disappointment. But if Chernyakov left Wagner in “The Ring” without a cleansing world fire, and Prokofiev (and Tolstoy) in “War and Peace” without a cleansing popular triumph, then why should he leave Janáček (and Dostoevsky) with a cleansing enlightenment through suffering? Nadezhda may be the last to die, but in 100–150 years it manages to age considerably.

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