Opera North‘s first outing of Smetana’s foot-tappingly tuneful and characterful comedy The Bartered Bride dressed the piece in what might be loosely termed today as “pasted on” folksiness. I retain fond memories of Steven Pimlott’s previous 1981 production with its voluminous 19th Century frocks and tall hats. This was a traditional staging of its time, expected by the growing audience of a then new opera company not yet daring to court controversy.
The current production, directed by Daniel Slater and conducted by Oliver von Dohnányi, originally starred Alwyn Mellor as Mařenka, Niall Archer as Jenik and Clive Bayley as Kecal when it premiered at Leeds Grand Theatre in September 1998. The events precipitated by the removal of the Berlin Wall a decade earlier had irrevocably changed the face of eastern Europe. By the early 1990s the iron fist had been replaced by the Velvet Revolution in the (former) Czechoslovakia. Slater deliberately pre-dates the Gorbachev Glasnost era by setting his production in the still Communist dominated Czechoslovakia of the early 1970s – a decade of dubious fashions and even more dubious hairstyles – and only a few years after the Prague Spring had been ruthlessly crushed by Soviet tanks.
Opera Britannia 