No Cure for Opera Addicts

Dmitri Tcherniakov has been responsible for some of the most intelligent productions at the Staatsoper Berlin in recent years. Yet between his characters, who range from emotionally stunted to wholly traumatised, and his aesthetic, which tends toward deadening blandness (Die Zarenbraut, set in a glossy television studio), uncomfortable squalor (his magnificent Parsifal) or sometimes both at once (last season’s Tristan und Isolde), there is little in his approach that would seem naturally suited to comedy. His new production of Prokofiev’s high-spirited Betrothal in a Monastery – the central opera at this year’s Festtage – certainly did not resemble a comedy in any conventional sense; yet his oddly engaging concept and meticulous handling of the action yielded a delightful staging that broke completely with the text, but captured much of…