Sound and fury | 22 November 2018

The People are angry. In fact, they’re bloody furious. As the lights flash up on David Pountney’s production of Prokofiev’s War & Peace, the entire cast confronts the audience: grim, braced, defiant. And before you’ve had time to wonder if this sort of thing is just the long-term legacy of Les Misérables, or whether opera directors really are in love with totalitarian imagery, they unleash hell. This is the chorus of Welsh National Opera, after all. You just know they’re going to slay, and they do. The massive, world-historical Epigraph to Act One shakes the walls and your place is no longer to question, but to sit there and be overawed.

To be fair, a Soviet composer during the second world war could hardly get away with anything less. It’s clear that Prokofiev originally envisaged something like Mussorgsky and Borodin’s historical epics, in which tub-thumping grandeur is undercut by a mixture of intimacy and mocking, satirical humour. But the commissars kept knocking it back: sorry, comrade, it needs more Heroic Workers in Act Two. Prokofiev never saw a definitive production, and Pountney attempts — with some success — to straddle both visions, establishing a continuity between the aristocratic peacetime world of Act One, and the brassy, sometimes blackly comic all-out war of Act Two.

Robert Innes Hopkins’s timber-walled arena serves as the set throughout. A smock-clad Tolstoy wandered ineffectively through the opening scenes before vanishing behind his infinitely more interesting characters, clad by costume designer Marie-Jeanne Lecca in a mixture of Regency-appropriate ballgowns and uniforms (for anyone who had a name) or peasant frocks and vaguely first world war-era khaki (for the masses). Less helpfully, spectacular battle scenes from Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1966 film version were projected in the background.