A night at the circus

The Royal Opera’s latest production is Shostakovich’s The Nose and to paraphrase Mark Steyn, whatever else can be said about it, you certainly get a lot of noses for your money. Noses are tossed from character to character, noses kneel in prayer and noses stroll casually past in the background. They poke through curtains, mingle in crowds, and form a high-kicking, tap-dancing all-nose chorus line. At one point, a little tiny nose toddles unaided across the vast, almost-empty stage. Around them swirls bustling, multicoloured madness: bearded ladies and moustachioed cops, women dressed like dayglo matryoshka dolls, and a couple of pigtailed cartoon Chinamen who might have wandered in from an Ellen Kent production of Turandot. It’s a regular circus.

The unseen ringmaster is the director Barrie Kosky, who’s having something of a moment in UK opera. He’s so hot right now: most recently on account of his universally adored Glyndebourne production of Handel’s Saul. That isn’t actually an opera, of course, and The Nose is hardly mainstream stuff either. Premièred in 1929, it’s Shostakovich as angry young modernist — before he had the anarchy punched out of him by Stalin. Gogol’s original story of a bureaucratic drudge whose nose quits his face to pursue an independent (and altogether more successful) career can be read as satire, but Shostakovich’s score treats it as an absurdist romp: fidgety and raucous, hurling out idea after idea to see what sticks.

Kosky takes the same approach, and it has to be said that it looks fantastic — and not just for the visual flair with which Kosky choreographs his stripping policemen or his squadrons of apparatchiks on tricycle-mounted desks. He pulls deftly in and out of focus, suddenly leaving the scene bare apart from a bread-making housewife wreathed in illuminated clouds of flour, or our hero, the hapless (and noseless) collegiate assessor Kovalov huddled self-pityingly in bed.