Russian ragout

There is famously no door into the late-night diner of Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’. Its three silent patrons are trapped behind the plate-glass window — specimens of urban disaffection and isolation. In Richard Jones’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk it’s the windows that are so disquietingly absent.

John Macfarlane’s designs propel the action of Shostakovich’s final opera through an endless enfilade of rooms. There are doors aplenty, and thresholds — of morality, sexuality and social status — are gleefully broached and breached, but each ultimately leads only to another domestic hell. If Hopper’s characters are goldfish in a glass bowl, then Jones’s are rats in a cage, and with the rat poison in view from the start the scene is rank with foreboding.

There’s a delicious squalor but also — more surprisingly — a disarming pathos to Jones’s production, seen here at the Royal Opera for the first time since 2004. Updating the action of Shostakovich’s Soviet-censored opera from pre-revolutionary Russia to the 1950s, Jones steers away from any overt politicking in favour of kitchen-sink intimacy — a claustrophobic operatic close-up that refuses to pan to the wide shot, crushing a chorus of workers and even a brass band into the close confines of the domestic space.

The apartment (papered in signature Jones prints, natch) that Katerina Ismailova shares with her lecherous father-in-law Boris and her husband Zinovy may be grubby and bleak, but a baby-pink fridge and mint-green kitchen units speak pathetically of aspiration — of a fantasy of bourgeois domesticity long-since tarnished by life. It’s these gestures of hope — Katerina’s green stockings, defiantly bright even as she heads to the Siberian prison camp, the wallpaper she hangs as a backdrop to her new life with lover Sergei — that stab deepest in a production that isn’t short on violence.