What Happens in the Dark

There was no warning. One minute we were sitting in the Schiller Theater waiting for the orchestra to finish tuning, then suddenly we found ourselves in total darkness. After a few uncomfortable moments of silent expectation, a sound emerged from the depths and the curtain rose on a scene as bleak as any that has appeared recently on a Berlin stage. The banks of the Volga – on which the action of Janáček’s Katja Kabanowa is set – had been replaced with a scene straight out of some magazine exposé on rural poverty, a dirty, grey space littered with broken furniture and appliances; the river itself had been reduced to little more than a trickle, cutting an uneven path through the dirt. The story that would unfold over the next hundred minutes would be every bit as hopeless as the setting, but the unrelenting grimness of the production…