Boris unmasked

It’s extraordinary how many works have been upstaged by the operas based upon them. Of none is this truer than those of Pushkin, whom the Russians regard as highly as we do Shakespeare or the Germans Goethe.

Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades are known to most of us primarily from Tchaikovsky’s operas, and Boris Godunov from Mussorgsky. Just how much we’ve been missing is apparent in Michael Boyd’s revelatory staging of the original 1825 Boris Godunov play in Adrian Mitchell’s verse adaptation. It’s a great coup for Sir Michael — the RSC artistic director’s valedictory production appears to be the play’s first professional staging here.

Mussorgsky’s cherry-picking from Pushkin’s 25 short scenes of those most suited for musical treatment — Boris’s self-torturing monologues, the Pretender’s courting of the Polish princess Maryna and the crowd scenes — has made it hard to believe there was more to be mined from the play. Wrong, and wrong again. In restoring Pushkin’s more complex political spectrum, Mitchell and Boyd show just why the Russians esteem him so highly.

Boyd finds a tone and style that rescue Boris Godunov from the serioso grandiloquence of Mussorgsky’s appropriation, brilliant of course though that is. The composer portrays a mighty Tsar, brought down by cancerous guilt for assassinating Dmitry, rightful heir of Ivan the Terrible, while bells toll and a holy fool bemoans the fate of the motherland. Taking these impressions with you into the Swan, you’ll be astonished to meet Lloyd Hutchinson’s Boris, a grizzled, ill-at-ease hustler, cracking jokes in a Northern Irish accent and scarcely crediting his luck at what he’s been getting away with. By the boyars he’s sniffily regarded as a low-born upstart whom they can’t wait to depose. In the meantime they’ll play along, but ever ready to throw in their lot with the rising fortunes of Grigory (or Grishka), the Pretender who claims to be Dmitry, a Dmitry who miraculously survived Boris’s assassination.