Opera that might make you think of the coronavirus pandemic – Jenufa by Leos Janacek staged for Hong Kong Arts Festival screening
- The stage for the second act of Theatre National Brno’s production of Jenufa looks uncannily like a quarantine hotel, though the design predates the pandemic
- Jenufa is one of two Janacek operas offered for free streaming to Arts Festival patrons; the other, The Cunning Little Vixen, has the most unlikely roots
The audience for the National Theatre Brno’s recent production of Leos Janacek’s opera Jenufa, being screened as part of the Hong Kong Arts Festival’s celebration of Czech music this year, might be forgiven for thinking that the staging was inspired by the coronavirus pandemic.
As the curtain rises for the second act, we see four square rooms, all in a line, uncannily like the next-door rooms of a quarantine hotel.
The furnishings in each are identical: two chairs, a table, a basket of fruit, a cabinet, with a door behind leading to a bed. And in each, at the beginning, there is a maximum of one person, each alone in his or her pain.
The production, directed by Martin Glaser, was created well before anyone could imagine how coronavirus put so many of us in our separate rooms. Yet it would not be surprising, the theatre’s artistic director Jiri Hefman says in a Zoom interview, if many people watching this interpreted it to incorporate their own story, which might include their experiences of being in this pandemic.
“I have always found it fascinating that every one of us can find that music has our own story in it,” he says. “And that it says something different to each person who watches it and listens to it.”
Janacek is no stranger to Hong Kong opera goers; his work The Makropulos Case was staged in the city for the Arts Festival in 2017, as was Jenufa more than two decades ago.Jenufa’s is a tragic story – about a young woman who is abandoned by the father of her child, and whose baby is then drowned by her own guardian, who wants Jenufa to have a better life, and believes she could not have it as a single woman with a baby.