Romeo and Juliet crossed with Bonnie and Clyde: Denis Muravyov and Katya Vlasova were both innocent and transgressive. Music Theatre Wales’s UK premiere of an opera based on the true story of two Russian 15-year-olds in the Pskov town of Strugi Krasnye, who over three days livestreamed their own demise on Periscope, is chilling. The standoff and police shootout was the stuff of tragedy.
Yet the manner of composer Philip Venables’s and librettist/director Ted Huffman’s telling of their tale is unusual. Neither Denis nor Katya is portrayed: instead events are plotted – piecemeal and post hoc – by two protagonists playing the roles of journalist, friend, neighbour, teenager, teacher and medic. Mezzo-soprano Emily Edmonds and baritone Johnny Herford, already much acclaimed in last year’s Opera Philadelphia premiere, project these with objectivity and passion. Four cellists, one in each corner of the bare set, form a sort of Greek chorus.
A horrible immediacy comes from the fast intercutting technique of film or video applied to both libretto and score, whether witness testimony, spoken narrative or sung monologue; words projected on the screen quote original livestream comments and trolling, as well as strategic reasoning in Venables and Huffman’s creative process and that of co-author/translator Ksenia Ravvina. Vindicating their argument that the piece would be stronger for not showing any of the actual streamed video, the final image of Strugi Krasnye is even more bleakly evocative. That still shot becomes a pan, the view from a train pulling away from the station, gradually gaining speed, the soundscape now a crushing metallic grind. The final music carries an almost baroque feel, individual cello lines in haunting threnody.
Echoing an ancient wedding ritual, each had dyed their hair to take the other’s look. Realising they had gone too far, they asked in vain for their online viewers’ advice. Given the present questions about the toxicity of social media, the opera’s focus on the nature of voyeurism is particularly uncomfortable. So, too, is the unavoidable rider that society as a whole is complicit in such deaths.
