And now? "I'm well, but wish I were ill; falling into sinfulness, as if I were standing on the edge of the abyss."Is it congenital? An unmentioned miscarriage? A childhood dalliance? A repressed secret? A history of contrariness? Trauma? Religion? Depression? A debility? Or simply that "strange longing", that lethal struggle of heart vs common sense, and an unexpected surge of Jung's "individuation impulse", which prods her, ineluctably, towards a liaison whose consequences she knows she can't control, and to suicide in the Volga? Or is Katya, compacted from Ostrovsky's The Storm (the cataclysm, complete with Peter Grimes-like pursuing chorus, supplies the societal crux in Act Three), simply a remarkably modern parable of family emotional abuse, battering relations of a kind that permeate the Victorian novel, and focusing on that cryptic or blatant cruelty that can obtain between woman and girl? The Kostelnicka of this opera is Kabanicha, Katya's mother-in-law, odious to youth, jealous of her fading rule, systematically and stylishly vile to her hapless charge, and played with a nice line in governess brutality by Suzanne Murphy. Her fellow bully is the merchant Dikoy, the hero's uncle, performed with restraint and in magnificent voice by Alan Fairs: as the designer Vicky Mortimer's quarter-framing zooms in on the pair, flirting, conniving and flicking fag-ash from the window, the triumphal hypocrisy of this ancien r?me is fabulously parodied.Mitchell's production is as pure as the free air where Katya craves to soar, seagull-like, in her rapt Bartokian vision (Janacek's accompanying sequence of bassoon, horn, flutes, flickering harp, solo violin and cellos mesmerised). Mortimer's opening set, neatly revisited at the close, is a caf?hat looks a cross between a waiting-room and a peeling sanatorium Behind, the Volga meanders, a serpent awaiting its prey. Other interiors, set front-stage and lit with marvellous naturalness by Paule Constable, open on to a primeval birch forest, seen with a curious, distorted, watery opaqueness through glass, then revealed, like a rush of cool air, for the outdoor bathing scene.
Here the two pairs of lovers rendezvous : the innocently corrupting Varvara (Claire Bradshaw, a wonderful mezzo, sawing through the thickest of Janacek's orchestrations) with her schoolmaster beau, Kudryash (strong support from Nicholas Sears), their freedom epitomised by the girl's gazelle-like entry and their gloriously risqu?each-towel disrobing; and the terrified Katya, doubts reluctantly doused as she finally yields to her lover in a Volga dip, his rapt tenor wafting in from off stage.Nuccia Focile's bird-like Katya proved wonderful casting: her voice both beautiful and, when needed, searing; her movement exquisite. This Katya says multum in parvo: her doomed pirouette with Boris was heart-rending; the tiniest twist of her neck, the smallest half-turn, speaks volumes Volumes, too, for Mitchell's control of her cast. An inspired evening.Roderic DunnettNew Theatre, Cardiff till 30 May, then touring to Southampton (20 Jun), Oxford (28 Jun), Llandudno (5 July), Bristol (12 July). A couple of weeks ago, finding myself in funds for a change (it didn't last long), I went to the photography section of my local bookshop to check out the recent publications. Among the titles that caught my eye: Atget the Pioneer, at £45; a collection of work by Bill Brandt, at £48; Brassa? Paris by Night, at £29.95; a Marc Riboud retrospective, at £30; Sebastiao Salgado's Migrations, at £60 (though the much slimmer Children was only £30); the Vietnam War anthology Requiem, at £40; Ray K Metzker's Landscapes, at £37.50; and a History of Women Photographers, at £40. Conclusion: it is virtually impossible to buy a decent new photographic book these days without parting with at least three tenners.
A couple of weeks ago, finding myself in funds for a change (it didn't last long), I went to the photography section of my local bookshop to check out the recent publications. Among the titles that caught my eye: Atget the Pioneer, at £45; a collection of work by Bill Brandt, at £48; Brassa? Paris by Night, at £29.95; a Marc Riboud retrospective, at £30; Sebastiao Salgado's Migrations, at £60 (though the much slimmer Children was only £30); the Vietnam War anthology Requiem, at £40; Ray K Metzker's Landscapes, at £37.50; and a History of Women Photographers, at £40. Conclusion: it is virtually impossible to buy a decent new photographic book these days without parting with at least three tenners. I offer this highly unrepresentative and wildly unscientific sampling not in anger at the greed of photographic publishers two or three of those titles struck me, all things considered, as more than reasonably priced, indeed bargains but in regret that the building of even a modest personal photo-library is such a prohibitively expensive business nowadays, especially for the very people who need and (let's hope) crave one most aspiring students of the art, whether young or mature, amateur or professional, practitioner or historian. It almost seems like a calculated insult to photography's traditional promise of democratic inclusiveness.Plainly, this is not a state of affairs that is going to improve in a hurry, but there is now at least one beam of kindly light amid the encircling gloom. Phaidon Press has launched a new series of photographic books under the alliterative series brand-name of Phaidon 55: each 128-page volume presents, as the quick-witted will already have guessed, a portfolio of 55 images by a particular photographer, accompanied by a 4,000-word critical essay, explanatory captions for each picture and a biographical chronology.Pocket-sized and almost square in format, they are elegantly designed, beautifully printed on high-quality paper in both monochrome and colour, and sensitively laid out, with just one image per double-page spread.
