Kátya Kaban­ová was the first opera I ever saw, back in 1996 when it was here for the Inter­na­tion­al Fest­iv­al. I was 16, and we got $5 tick­ets to the dress rehersal through drama class. I was over­whelmed by the music and the draaaaama and the rain on stage and the cliff that rose up on hydraul­ics and cried my eyes out. Need­less to say, when we were offered tick­ets to NZ Oper­a’s mount­ing of Kátya , I jumped at the chance.

Katya at home (image Dav­id Row­land)

Katya is a woman trapped in an unhappy mar­riage who dreams of fly­ing away like a bird. My com­pan­ion thought it was a little on the nose to set it in a Nor­man Rock­well paint­ing, but I thought the suf­foc­at­ing Laura Ash­ley flor­als of 1950s sub­ur­bia was fit­ting. It helped bridge the gap between the mostly sec­u­lar world of New Zea­l­and in 2017 where fem­in­ism has brought a lot more free­dom to (some) women and social ruin might just be people block­ing you on Twit­ter, and Czechoslov­akia in 1921. One thing remains the same through­out the ages though – Kátya’s lov­er Bor­is is def­in­itely a no good fuck­boi.

Sets were gor­geously designed, mostly sparse but with great use of pro­jec­ted video back­grounds. Dina Kuznet­sova as Kátya was abso­lutely stun­ning, a beau­ti­ful voice and con­veyed so much with her face. Her nasty moth­er in law (Mar­garet Medlyn as Kabanicha) was par­tic­u­larly icy and I loved the swag­ger of the badass sis­ter in law. This par­tic­u­lar opera has a lot of talk­ing through song, which isn’t my favour­ite thing, and because it’s in Czech, it soun­ded par­tic­u­larly spikey against the music to my Eng­lish ears. The singing and the music often seemed to be going in dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tions, which is prob­ably the way it is writ­ten but made me feel a little pan­icky at times. 

Katya and the stars (Photo by Dav­id Row­land)

If you’re an opera fan or love good stage craft, give it a whirl. The per­form­ance was great, even though I hate the story because ugh doomed love and ugh fuck­bois and ugh dis­em­powered women (and yes, I know that’s basic­ally all opera). I would sug­gest it’s per­haps not the best opera for a first timer, but if it is your first, here’s a tip no one gave me back in 1996: For the whole first act, I thought I was either miss­ing really obvi­ous jokes or was seated in an audi­ence who all spoke Czech. Then I spot­ted the sur­titles.