Tricks and Hallucinations Playing on our Minds

(Along with furry fornicators.)

If there was a key phrase that set up Alden’s production of ENO’s The Queen of Spades, it’s that phrase sung by Hermann as his gambling disease becomes terminal. It is, for all the productions that emphasise the glamour of Tsarist Russia, all the grandes dames and grander jewelry, a sordid story.

Surrounded by dissolute army comrades (a word of some resonance in this production, as we will see) a gambling addict, callously engages in the seduction of a young woman to find the perfect system, murders an old woman to get it. And the girl commits suicide.

Of course, the perfect system doesn’t work. Though, never having had any aptitude of any sort for any card game apart from Snap myself, and however effectively I can suspend my disbelief, the efficacy of a Three, a Seven and an Ace has always struck me as the most implausible part of the entire plot. But then perhaps someone desperate and crazy enough might kill in the belief the target has Saturday’s winning lottery number, though I rather doubt anyone has. Yet.

It is something of a melodrama, and both the production and Edward Gardner’s orchestra reminded us of that in the first act, with probably the most effective and melodramatic torrential downpour and thunderstorm ever produced with nothing more than an orchestra and flashing lights across the stage. Coming from a part of the country where vivid storms were frequent and scary, I’m not easily impressed by theatrical representations that often belong in teacups, but that was truly superb.

It does seem, judging from comments around the place, and with which I suspected a couple sitting near me would agree with, that a lot of people didn’t quite get this production. Though, if they’d not taken the point before the interval, Hermann’s “What if it wasn’t true? Tricks and hallucinations, playing on my mind?” should have jolted the brain cells into action.

It was a production of many tricks and hallucinations. Set in a drab early Sixties Soviet (seeing a mess  of Soviet soldiers attempting the Twist was just that, and hilarious) it is not only Hermann who is subject to hallucinations. So is the Countess: living now in a kind of White Russian dream world; though it is stretching things a bit accepting that as she sings of Madame Pompadour and the King.

It is perhaps less of stretch to accept the scenario of bored and alcoholic Soviet-era soldiery and citizenry in a dreary strained world drinking gambling and dancing themselves into a misty kind of nostalgia for some better existence that still can’t be either quite imagined or hoped for.

You don’t have to read Pushkin or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky to know that. A few years ago, I spoke to a Russian musician, whose orchestra had just received a huge ovation for a spectacular performance. “People thought that was wonderful, but none of you looked very happy,” I said. “Oh, we were.” he said. Then he fell silent for a few seconds, looked strangely sad himself and walked on a few paces. Then he turned back to us. “Perhaps,” he said, struggling a little with English, “it is because we are Russian. Many sad things. A long time. In Russia.”

So, there is drinking, dancing, even clunky piano playing in a sad earnestness and desperation for some fulfillment: and sad, because it is only half-conceived and joyless in this production. So is the sex: subsumed in the supposedly, but obviously illusory ‘greater’ thrill of gambling. As is the furry fornication on stage which many of the audience couldn’t quite take. Hermann was not altogether seeing pink elephants, though there was an elephant-headed fornicator among the furry animals, so much as a zoo.

Tricks and hallucinations. Playing on the mind. Why is it, I have to ask yet again, that so many opera goers don’t seem to worry about their minds being played with by opera plots, but are so intransigent often when the staging or production messes with them? How is it people willingly suspend their disbelief as someone spends five minutes after what should have been an instantaneous death singing about it? But cannot, or will not, do the same faced with an ‘untraditional’ staging?

Though perhaps that is changing. Much to my relief, I have at last noticed rather more people ineligible for bus passes in the last two operas I’ve been to: Il Turco in Italia at Covent Garden, and Thursday night at The Queen of Spades.  I hope that means a new generation more open and less curmudgeonly. We need it.

For those at the Coliseum who might have preferred to shut their eyes (and their minds) and only open their ears, what they heard was brilliant Tchaikovsky from Gardner and the orchestra; a single opera score played with every nuance, subtlety, glorious tonal colour and development, and above all timing, that you might at almost any moment have believed you were in the middle of a great Tchaikovsky symphony cycle instead.

Brilliant. And a glorious finale to Edward Gardner’s tenure at ENO.

There  are only a handful of performances left. If it’s only to hear superbly played Tchaikovsky, whatever you have heard or read about the production, go!