The 2024 Janáček Brno Festival closed on Nov. 24 with a revival of National Theatre Brno’s 2018 production of Janáček’s 1924 opera, The Cunning Little Vixen. Set in Brno’s historic Dagmar Children’s Home for abandoned children, company artistic director Jiří Heřman’s vision is inventive, but insufficiently focused. Too many competing visual and dramaturgical elements distract from the original story’s life-affirming message.
At the start, we see period photos of the original care home’s functionalist edifice which are echoed in the clean lines and round window of the set. Children are everywhere, running on and off stage pushing wooden animal toys and playing small roles in the opera’s ‘original’ story they are seemingly about to tell. A looming male figure (the institute’s director?) will eventually become the fictional Forester of original author Rudolf Těsnohlídek’s story. Also sharing the two-level set is a group of black-clad dancers and the entire chorus. Often, all three of these groups flit about waving plastic insect wings or are physically manipulating the main characters.
Scene from National Theatre Brno’s The Cunning Little Vixen. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek
The boundaries between the historic setting and the opera’s story are often confusingly unclear. For example, one of the children, a tiny red-headed girl, seems to represent the young, titular ginger vixen. She appears to be a favourite of the institute’s director, who in his guise as Forester, captures the ‘grown-up’ vixen and locks her up in his home. However, the line between historical ‘reality’ and the fictional care home is not satisfactorily drawn.
Alexandra Grusková’s costumes, Dragan Stojčevski’s sets and Daniel Tesař’s lighting are a visual treat, but again, sometimes too much of a good thing. Trap doors, lighting festooned with dragonfly wings lowered on wires and giant eggs in various states of being cracked open all compete for our attention. These visuals, layered on top of a lot of busy movement by so many on stage bodies made it even more difficult to distinguish between the ‘original’ story and the framing device of the children’s home.
Kateřina Kněžíková (the Vixen) in National Theatre Brno’s The Cunning Little Vixen. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek
This lack of narrative and visual clarity might not have mattered so much if it didn’t also have the effect of setting up an emotional wall. The Vixen ultimately escapes from the Forester’s home, falls in love with the Fox, and before you know it, produces a prodigious litter. In order to feed her offspring, she poaches a chicken from a huntsman’s pouch and is shot when he discovers her. This should be an intensely sad and shocking moment. However, the almost Brechtian alienation effects of the staging deny us the emotional payoff.
Later, we are likewise left wanting when the Forester meets one of the Vixen’s cubs and comes to a profound realisation about the glorious cycle of life. Here, he is reacquainted with Act 1’s little red-headed girl but it’s difficult to ignore she is a product of this concept, and is therefore a few steps removed from the actual Vixen. We, and the Forester, are robbed of the opportunity to connect this young ‘vixen’ with her mother who was shockingly killed a few minutes before. And for those hoping for some kind of resolution of the institution director/little girl storyline, there isn’t much to satisfy.
The lack of dramaturgical focus also made it difficult for the excellent cast to fully inhabit their roles. As the Forester, the great Czech bass-baritone Adam Plachetka certainly commands the role’s vocal measure. He dutifully undertook all that was assigned to him from a signature chicken dance to multiple bouts of staring into space and lying prone on the floor. I would love to hear him again in a production that allows him to transmit the character’s deep humanity more clearly.
Adam Plachetka (the Forester) in National Theatre Brno’s The Cunning Little Vixen. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek
As the Vixen, soprano Kateřina Kněžíková offered gorgeous tone and an energetic presence. But again, it was difficult to fully grasp who she was supposed to represent: a grown-up version of the little redhead or the actual Vixen? Is the little girl who appears at the conclusion meant to be the child of the original redheaded poppet? Audiences don’t need every detail spelled out, but too much nuance can be alienating.
The European ‘house’ system, in which companies employ a home team of soloists, chorus and orchestra, affords opportunities to experience the same singers in multiple roles. Having just heard mezzo-soprano Václava Krejčí Housková as the witch in the previous evening’s Rusalka, it was a pleasure to encounter her again in a very different role as the Fox. She was deliciously saucy as the Vixen’s preening paramour, offering a lovely, lyric high range. Unbelievably, I think I saw soprano Eliška Gattringerová in yet another guise, this time as the bossy Rooster, having only just heard her two nights running as two very different characters (the Foreign Princess in Rusalka and Kostelnička in Jenůfa).
Brno’s music director Marko Ivanović also returned to lead the orchestra after the previous night’s Rusalka. They uncovered all of the triumphant fanfares and acidic harmonies contained within Janáček’s glorious score.
