“Spring is here at last!” exclaims an ecstatically enlightened Forester as he marvels at the renewing power of Nature in an outpouring of pantheistic wonder at the close of The Cunning Little Vixen. Alas, this most glorious of operatic culminations is completely botched in Jamie Manton’s production. On opening night, as the curtain fell all too slowly, no-one on stage, and probably not many in the audience, seemed to know what was going on.
By this time, Janáček’s masterpiece had become inextricably tangled in Manton’s web of half-baked ideas and agendas. Created for English National Opera, the 2022 staging seems to have taken its cue not from the transcendent ending but from the depressive utterances of the innkeeper’s wife a few minutes earlier, concerning unhappiness and loneliness, accompanied by villagers loping off the stage like zombies. Indeed, it seems that for Manton it is death rather than affirmation of life that dominates the entire opera. The stage – flat and featureless, in absolute contrast to the music – is cluttered with piles of logs, and with superfluous characters dressed in black sou’westers and wellingtons, who seem to have wandered in from Peter Grimes: harbingers of death, or “time-keepers”, apparently.
Manton also brings in alter-egos each for the Vixen and the Forester. The young vixen gets a not-so-young vixen Doppelgänger, who seems not to know why they are there. They sit idly near the adult Vixen as she is (supposed to be) dreaming of her freedom – another should-be-spine-tingling episode that went for nothing – and much later they traipse after her as she miraculously recovers from being shot dead and walks off through the rear stage door. Conveniently carrying its luminous Exit sign, this door is also the Forester’s fate, after he has briefly disported with his younger and even younger selves. The audience has no clue as to who these extras are, but at least they don’t clutter the stage as pointlessly as the ‘men in black’.
With all this doom and gloom, we might expect the omnipresent unfurling scroll hanging from one of the many logs, to provide some splashes of colour. Alas not, unless it was that the theatre’s printer had run out of colour ink. The illustrations, hit-and-miss in their creative point, are mainly grey-scale, with a few token orange splashes.
Admittedly the animal characters brought some colour and life to the stage, albeit sporadically and chaotically. Manton’s big idea seems to be that the forest has been gutted by human beings, but that Nature finds a way to return – hence a plethora of dragonflies to represent resilience and some giant perambulating mushrooms.