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.