The Cunning Little Vixen review – colourful staging takes Janáček’s opera to the dark side

Coliseum, London
Anguish rather than sentiment is to the fore in Jamie Manton’s new production, with Sally Matthews and Pumeza Matshikiza a well-matched central pair

Storms blew away last week’s planned premiere of English National Opera’s new version of Janáček’s 1924 hymn to the cycles of the living world. The opening was quickly rescheduled for Sunday afternoon, but it was a useful reminder that our coexistence in nature has a pitiless side, as well as the pantheistic charge that fires Janáček’s ecstatic score.

Jamie Manton’s busy staging is fuelled by anguish not sentiment. The composer set his opera in a Moravian forest, where a woodman captures a young vixen, who escapes back to the wild to raise a brood of cubs, only to fall victim to a hunter from the village. But Tom Scutt’s designs, fiercely lit by Lucy Carter, give us instead a deforested landscape, blasted by logging, in which the rhythms of life play out against a backdrop scroll that unwinds a visual representation of the story to reveal a chillingly blank sheet at the close.

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