IT IS unlikely that any description of social and cultural change in contemporary Ireland would make much of the fact that it is now able to sustain on a more or less permanent basis a really serious opera company. Yet, maybe it should. The gradual emergence over the last decade of Opera Theatre Company, whose superb production of Janacek's Katya Kabanova plays the Hawk's Well in Sligo tonight before moving on to Tuam on Thursday and Inis Oirr on Saturday, is genuinely remarkable. For it tells us much more about ourselves than the mere fact that there are good singers and a good audience for their work. The singers, the audience, the musicians, the popular tradition of plebian opera loving, have all been there for a long time. OTC has added something quite new.
In a way, Katya Kabanova itself is a good mark of what has changed. It was written in the early 1920s in a small European country with a history not altogether different to our own. It is, in a fairly obvious way, a part of the late flowering of romantic cultural nationalism in which we shared. Its composer, Leos Janacek, was a Moravian Czech trying, like Yeats and Synge here, to build a bridge between folk culture and European modernism. For all its use of Russian settings and Czech village life, Katya Kabanova could, as director James Conway subtly reminds us in the OTC production, be set in Tuam or Clonakilty. But in another sense it is unthinkable that this opera could ever have been composed and produced in Ireland. ,Opera simply didn't have that kind of place in Irish culture.
Which is not to say that it didn't have a place at all. It had, as anyone who ever heard Tommy O'Brien talking about Clonmel in the 1930s or Tom Murphy remembering Tuam in the 1950s, a very big place in some people's lives. It was, in the words that Marx used to describe religion, "the heart of a heartless world". It was a parallel universe - luxurious where life was frugal, passionate, where life was buttoned up, a blast of fire in a cold climate. Tommy O'Brien who, on his radio show, would go into raptures about Tito Gobbi and Totti del Monte, actually spent his days as a stenographer in the circuit court in Clonmel. Tom Murphy's Irishman in The Gigli Concert, possessed by the spirit of Beniamino Gigli, spends his days as a mean minded builder up to his armpits in "corruption, brutality, backhanding, fronthanding".
Opera was, in our culture, "a compensation. It was, as they say in the States, counter factual. And as compensation it had to be as far from reality as small budgets and tacky sets could possibly make it. We didn't really have opera companies - we had opera festivals, opera as a holiday, an escape. And you don't go on holidays to see more of what you've left behind.
What is so different, and so important about James Conway's work with OTC is that it isn't compensating for anything and more. Conway shows no interest in the escapist side of op era. Obviously, it makes economic sense for OTC, as a touring company working on tight budgets, to work with small casts, minimal musical accompaniment and stark sets. But you always sense with Conway's productions that, given limitless resources, he would do the same things for aesthetic reasons anyway. They have no, feeling of being reduced or of making do. They are not simple because they can't afford the frills. They are simple because Conway has the confidence, even the arrogance, to trust the basic elements of the art: singing, music, staging, drama.
Katya Kabanova goes further in this direction than I have seen OTC go before. It does so not as an abstract exercise in style, but because of the nature, of the work itself. For the reason it is impossible to imagine a Janacek in the Ireland of the 1920s is that far from being an attempt to compensate for reality, Katya Kabanova is as near to being a piece of realism as opera can get. It tells, with severe truthfulness, an intimate but commonplace small town story of an unhappily married young women committing adultery - and paying the inevitable price. It is full of all the things sexual and economic repress on, religious hypocrisy, the tyranny of the old over the young - that Irish people used to go to the opera to forget.
Even the touches of opulence: seem hard won. Frank Conway's superbly accomplished set, full of levels and turnings, avoids ornament and fussiness and saves its richness for subtle variations in the dark colouring. Tina McHugh's lighting, too, is carefully muted, making as much play of shadows as it does of brightness. And the singing itself, is seldom sweet Janacek keeps his lyric impulse in check, the melodic moments made all the more precious because we know that the are interludes of repose on the jagged path to tragedy.
IN MUSICAL terms, the production is probably impoverished by having just a single piano accompaniment (albeit by the powerfully impressive Dearbhla Collins) rather than the full score but in dramatic terms the starkness of the music without the lush tones of an orchestra to round off its angularities is actually a considerable advantage. Not only does it enhance the stern intensify of the piece, but it allows the singers to play to the story and the situation rather than to the score. At times, the exchanges between Regina Hanley's memorable Katya, Kathleen Tynan's Varvara and Declan Kelly's Vanya have the emotional directness of straight dialogue. Because the singing, beautiful as it often is, never seems for a moment to move outside the frame of the action, we never lose our faith in the gripping reality of people caught in an all too recognisable world. That we can afford, even in opera, to stick with life as we know it must be a sign that life itself is becoming bearable.
