Review | Silent Opera’s immersive opera Vixen without orchestra, chorus or stage brings narrative clarity to Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen
- Silent Opera’s immersive opera replaces colloquial Czech of the Janacek work it’s based on with vernacular English, and makes the original’s story much clearer
- For small-scale opera to work, singers need to make adjustments, and here some did not dial back their voices’ power enough or lend drama to their characters
Silent Opera, founded in 2011 by the London-based stage director Daisy Evans, is an exercise in creative destruction. Take traditional operas, rip away the orchestra, chorus and any superfluous characters – and while we’re at it, the stage – and what do you have left?
In the case of Vixen, a 70-minute immersive presentation at Tai Kwun’s Prison Yard and Laundry Steps as part of this year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival, you have an engaging, challenging and often frustrating argument over the relevance of the art form itself.
Much of this stems from the source material. Drawing on an illustrated novel originally serialised in a Czech daily newspaper, Leos Janacek fashioned tales of a cunning (or “sharp-eared”) fox and her dealings with humans and other species into an opera like no other, incorporating Moravian folk music with extended, highly evocative orchestral passages.
Since its premiere a century ago, productions of The Cunning Little Vixen have run the gamut from clever children’s cartoons to highly tragic metaphors for adults.
Silent Opera, to put it mildly, takes the adult route. Reconceived for Tai Kwun by Mark Burns from Evans’ original production, Vixen dispenses with metaphor entirely, the fox now becoming a homeless runaway (dubbed “the girl with the vixen tattoo” in a nod to Stieg Larsson’s bestseller). The forester is now named, well, Forester.
