Martin Kušej’s 2006 production of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, revived at Teatro di San Carlo by Herbert Stöger, is brutally unsettling from the very opening. The staging looks like an enquiry on “orgasm and murder”, as the director puts it, a study in black and terror of “the entire complex of Eros and sexuality when it is put under pressure from power and dependency structures”.
A socio-political reading, one would say, but with a robust psychoanalytic facet too, whose tone and mood were immediately established in the opening by Martin Zehetgruber's set, which evoked the bare dreadfulness of existence. The stage was surrounded by high walls on the three sides; in the middle, a glass cage where unmentionable cravings, mad sexual desires and lust for power were disclosed: that’s to say, our innermost impulses and deepest secrets which cannot be hidden.
The cage was an exhibition space, but also a trap to Katerina, one of the most fascinating roles of the 20th-century operatic repertoire. Her unconsummated marriage with Zinovy causes her sexual frustration, which she battles with a collection of elegant high-heeled shoes. But that is not enough. She unavoidably craves excitement, indulging the surge of a disquieting sexual tension with her father-in-law, Boris Ismailov. Then she has a lustful love affair with Sergey, an arrogant labourer; their illicit relationship grows more and more unabashed, provoking a vehement reprisal by Boris, who is then poisoned by Katerina: a cold-blooded homicide which leads to a massacre.
Many scenes could risk being particularly disturbing, as they were more than explicitly staged; among them, the tentative rape of Aksinia, Katerina’s seduction and her suicide. However, the director managed pretty well all of them, as their overt brutality appeared functional, nay, essential, to the structure of the drama. All in all, a dark, gloomy story as unambiguously told as it should be.