Look at it from the point of view of the child. The father he's never met sentences him and his mother to be nailed into a barrel and tossed into the sea. When the barrel smashes to smithereens, both somehow survive, washing up on a strange island where the boy saves a talking swan. No wonder he's screwed up. It's this angle Dmitri Tcherniakov chooses to pursue in his staging of The Tale of Tsar Saltan for La Monnaie, framing Rimsky-Korsakov's fairy tale opera with a modern parable where a mother narrates stories for her autistic son.
“Only fairy tales are real to him,” Militrisa explains to the audience in a spoken prologue. Gvidon plays with his toys: a squirrel, a set of toy soldiers and a doll of a swan princess (the Three Wonders of Act 4). He lives a largely silent world; the only person he will communicate with is his mother. As she begins her story – their own story – characters appear dressed in cartoon-style costumes which reference Ivan Bilibin's 1905 illustrations of Pushkin's story. Gvidon watches as his aunties plot against his mother, sending a message to Tsar Saltan – who is away at war – that his young wife has given birth not to a son, but to a monster. When the (falsified) decree arrives, a barrel is constructed around Militrisa and her baby and it's only at this point that the frontcloth rises and Tcherniakov's video designer, Gleb Filshtinsky, gets to play.
Animated sketches depict the barrel riding the swell of the waves in Rimsky's groaning seascape (the composer's naval career informed his writing in works such as this and Scheherazade and Sadko). On the Island of Buyan, we see Gvidon fashion a bow and arrow and save a swan from the clutches of an eagle's talons. When the swan appears, Olga Kulchynska reclines in the middle of a pencil sketch which is gradually coloured in during her gorgeous aria while the real Gvidon plays with his doll. Most movingly, Gvidon's imagination comes alive during the end of Act 2, and he climbs behind the gauze to be part of his own story, to enter his own fantasy world. The famous Flight of the Bumblebee is magically conjured, as are Gvidon-bee's antics stinging his aunties, disrupting their attempts to stop the tsar visiting Buyan himself.