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How many eels can one woman throw? Are there monsters in your basement? What do mermaids have in common with the sandworms from Dune?
If you’ve seen The Little Mermaid in any of its incarnations, you know the story of Dvořák’s opera Rusalka — just add an unhappy ending. This was not the tale told by director Kornél Mundruczó at Sunday night’s premiere in Berlin. His staging for the Staatsoper had the titular water-nymph as a disaffected young woman from a Berlin houseshare, whose lust for the rich boy upstairs causes her to mutate into a kind of distended earwig.
For reasons best known to himself, Mundruczó has decided to tell Rusalka as a version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Monika Pormale’s expensive-looking sets rise and fall to show us three different levels of a Berlin apartment block — a mouldy ground floor where Rusalka lives with three cheerful hippy girls and their psychedelic relic friend, the Waterman; a penthouse, complete with terrace and unbroken view of Alexanderplatz, where the Prince hangs out with his affluent family; and a surreal basement, full of black slime, for the final scene.
Like so many directors who come to opera from the theatre world, Mundruczó does not know what to do with a chorus — so much so that he leaves them to sing entirely offstage. The choristers do appear for the curtain call, so presumably they sing live, but they sound like a scratched phonograph playing through a loud hailer. Nor can Mundruczó deal with the music itself — the best he can manage for Dvořák’s cheerful Slavic dances is to let the hippies kick their legs and wave their arms on the beat. Cringe.
Who are these people, and what motivates them? Since the Waterman is just a drunk flatmate, it is never apparent what Rusalka feels the need to escape from; Ježibaba is the woman next door, with a penchant for eels and dry ice, who cuts Rusalka’s hair, dresses her up in a revealing frock and tapes her mouth shut. There will be more eels, and more dry ice, when Rusalka returns to her former life, along with a moment of grim mirth as the Prince’s wealthy relatives inspect the grimy hippy home with exaggerated horror.
So this is about class? Not really. Because if it was, why do the water sprites sing the final act dressed as garbage bags, and why does the protagonist change into a . . . thing? Mundruczó drifts from hyperrealism to surrealism without any coherence or logic, and with no real point to make. The revealing frock reads as mansplaining.
An excellent cast and brilliant conducting might have saved the evening, but unfortunately we had neither. Christiane Karg, when not in the frock or the worm suit, gets to lurch about like Gollum and sounds strained; her famous “Song to the Moon” is awkwardly delivered from the bathtub. Even Pavel Černoch’s Prince sounds a little one-dimensional, and Anna Kissjudit is never able to relax into Ježibaba’s throaty glee (maybe it’s all those eels she has to throw).
In the pit, Robin Ticciati seems out of his depth. Though he can manage a reasonable Slavic lilt, the orchestral sound never wins the depth and profundity that it needs, nor the bittersweet lyricism; things are often slightly out of sync, and the singers are audibly struggling.
It is depressing to see a house as well-resourced as Berlin’s Staatsoper fall into the double traps of big-name incompetence and empty gimmickry. This should be so much better.
★★☆☆☆
To February 22, staatsoper-berlin.de
