<<  -- 5 --  Rex Harley    PROFOUNDLY LIFE-ENHANCING

Nor is this production without its moments of high comedy. The scene where the Vixen poses as a friend of the chickens and their potential liberator, before killing each and every one of them, manages to be both a telling swipe at the excesses of dogmatic Communism and a hilarious piece of theatre. The chickens themselves are over-made-up, middle aged housewives in aprons and headscarves who might have wandered off the set of a 1960s episode of Coronation Street. They strut and peck their way to their foolish deaths, laying eggs in buckets along the way, each shedding a token handful of feathers before throwing up their hands in surprise and collapsing on the stage. At this point the audience too did its fair share of corpsing!

Like The Magic Flute, or indeed Sondheim's Into the Woods, The Cunning Little Vixen is one of those pieces of musical theatre which seems to transport the audience into another world, only for them to discover it is their own world intensified and, ultimately, revivified; and it is only a seeming paradox that an opera in which death comes suddenly and arbitrarily to its main character is also profoundly life-enhancing.

Further performances in England and Wales of the Welsh National Opera revival of Janácek's The Cunning Little Vixen take place at Birmingham Symphony Hall on 6 June 2002 (a concert performance conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras), in Llandudno on 15 June (conductor Gareth Jones), at the Oxford Apollo on 19 June (conducted by Mackerras), at the Southampton Mayflower on 29 June and the Plymouth Theatre Royal on 4 July 2002 (both conducted by Gareth Jones).