Pitch-black satire drenched in an atmosphere of compelling unease: ETO's Golden Cockerel reviewed

Blame it on Serge Diaghilev. Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908 and never saw the première of his last opera, The Golden Cockerel. When the great showman finally presented it in Paris in 1914, it was as Le Coq d’Or: a spectacular opera-ballet hybrid, with colourful, folk-inspired designs by Natalia Goncharova that came to define the Ballets Russes in its imperial phase. That was the form in which it came to Britain, where the Evening Standard described it as a ‘farrago of love-making, black magic and ingenuous inconsequence’ before turning to the real news – the costumes. And that’s the basic impression – a fabulous but flimsy slice of Slavic exotica – that has lodged itself in western memory, reinforced more recently by the Mariinsky company and Valery Gergiev. (We don’t talk about him any more.)

James Conway’s new production for English Touring Opera pulls away the tinsel and gives us the opera Rimsky wrote: a playful, pitch-black satire drenched in an atmosphere of compelling unease. Who knew? It’s no secret that Rimsky was prompted to write the opera by the bungled Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, or that he took the side of the reforming liberals. It’s just that nothing in The Golden Cockerel’s performance history leads you to expect something as pointed, as economical, and as outright funny as this Pushkin-based fairy tale of a paranoid autocrat who entrusts the safety of his kingdom to a magic chicken before launching a catastrophic invasion of a neighbouring state. No one in tsarist Russia needed to have it spelled out, and no one needs it now – though of course ETO planned this staging long before the current news cycle.