Review: THE NOSE, Royal Opera House, 20 October 2016

Composed when Shostakovich was just 21 years old, fresh from the conservatoire and still high on the success of his First Symphony, The Nose is a piece of musical rebellion - a fantasy of abrasive, rule-breaking joie de vivre whose absurd, anarchic rompings and musical shapeshiftings conceal a political switchblade under their brightly coloured clothes. This is pantomime, certainly, but adult pantomime. Never before staged at the Royal Opera, the piece now makes a belated debut, and in the hands of Australian director Barrie Kosky it looks scarcely less radical now than it would have done back in 1928.

Laughter is a powerful dramatic weapon. Not the kind of laughter you normally get in the Royal Opera House - knowing, self-conscious - but actual inelegant, snorting-before-you-even-realised-it laughter. Kosky harnesses this anarchic force, startling an audience expecting an improving piece of musical modernism by giving them instead a disarming piece of cutthroat comedy.

There will be those who argue that it misses the mark, loses the ghastly truth, the seriousness underpinning the original (Shostakovich did, after all, claim that "The Nose is a horror story, not a joke") but Kosky's is just a different path to the same end. The road may be shinier, and lined with kicking chorus girls, but after two hours of bewildering visual and sonic assault, we're left to return home to the same disturbed dreams, the same unspoken fears.

Based on a Gogol short story, the opera tells the tale of Kovalov, a low-ranking bureaucrat who wakes up one day to find his nose has disappeared. Searching desperately for it across St Petersburg, he finds it living its own independent life as a high-ranking official. Kovalov must pursue and capture the nose before attempting to restore it to his face - something easier said than done.

The opera's astonishing 77 named roles are here divided among 30 principals. It's the kind of luxurious casting scenario that only the Royal Opera could even contemplate - a true ensemble show, and a showcase of what this company's resources can and should achieve. Add to this a troupe of dancers who ride the violent rhythmic waves of Shostakovich's score (nicely controlled by Ingo Metzmacher), and you have an operatic spectacular pitched somewhere between vaudeville and Weimar cabaret. It's joyous, exhilarating stuff, its visual virtuosity systematically undercut with just enough scruff and grot to prevent it getting camp.

Kosky, in a brilliant sleight of hand, transforms the oversized nose into a mischievous tap-dancing boy. Ilan Galkoff clearly has a ball, and together with his troupe of adult tap dancers (ten in total) they nearly romp off with the piece, thanks to Otto Pichler's superb choreography and the witty designs of Klaus Grunberg.

A rash of false noses and some elaborate costumes make it hard to identify many of the players, but the core ensemble make their presence known, relishing the vernacular rough and tumble of David Pountney's new English translation. John Tomlinson leers and lurches and broods as (by turns) the Barber, Newspaper Office Clerk and Doctor, while the double act of Helene Schneiderman and Ailish Tynan forms a deliciously grotesque mother and daughter team. Alexander Kravets's Police Inspector finds comic gold in the composer's extraordinarily demanding vocal writing, and Susan Bickley makes much of her cameo as the Old Countess.

But the evening belongs to Martin Winkler, a singing-actor of such skill, whose physical and vocal clowning as the luckless Kovalev - all orifices and ooze in Kosky's hideous portrait - must penetrate this bustling phantasmagoria and make us care. Panto season has arrived early, and for those who like their clowns sad and their comedy sharpened to a point, there won't be a better show this winter.

The Nose is at the Royal Opera House until 9 November

Picture Credit: Bill Cooper

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