For two years, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk – the story of a married woman who takes a lover and murders her father-in-law and husband – was one of the most often performed of modern operas; until Stalin saw it in 1936, was outraged, and organised its removal from every theatre in the world.

One of the official complaints about the opera was that its depiction of sex and violence was pornographic. Seventy years later these sensational effects reveal a greater drama in Opera Australia’s new production.

Director Francesca Zambello updates the story to the Soviet era, where overbearing male sexuality and violence is just another form of oppression. Katerina Ismailova (Susan Bullock) is bored and sexually unfilled but lives in an environment of rampaging male sexuality: Chekhov meets jerk-off in provincial Russia. Her husband, Zinovy (David Corcoran) is an impotent weakling; her lecherous father-in-law, Boris (Daniel Sumegi) constantly prowling around her bedroom, wants to do the job for him.

Shostakovich’s music is exuberant and irreverent but has astonishing power in places. The scenes leading up to Katerina and her lover Sergei (Richard Berkeley-Steele) murdering her husband seethe with threatening music, and explode in the still-confronting episodes of sex or violence; the most notorious being the on-stage sex between Katerina and Sergei.

In the opening scene, trombones blurt slyly as Boris insinuates that Katerina is looking for a lover, and again in a later scene when he predicts her infidelity. Finally, when Katerina and Sergei are alone, their lovemaking is accompanied by music as frenzied and confronting as the stage action.

While Katerina experiences the passion her husband never gave her, and the philandering Sergei merely adds another conquest, those trombones now grunt wildly along with every thrust in the music, finally reaching a literal climax and aftermath that has to be heard to be believed.

Equally notorious is the scene of the cook Aksinya’s (Jacqueline Dark) near-rape by Sergei while half-naked workmen masturbate to her terrified screams.

Everything here reeks of sex, violence or depravity, and if the men of the Mtsensk district seem to get into circle jerks or sex parties faster and more frequently than a modern day frat house, it is observed with the same comic-book irony that runs through Shostakovich’s brilliant music. The coarseness of the men’s brutality is, like the music, in contrast to Katerina’s personal tragedy.

Susan Bullock is astounding in this most difficult role. Her voice rides the huge orchestra, or reduces to a mournful whisper in the lyrical arias where she sings of Katerina’s desperate loneliness. She acts the sex and violence with the same conviction she invests in every other scene, down to the weary resignation with which she drowns herself and Sergei’s new mistress.

Berkeley-Steele copes magnificently the short, jabbing vocal lines Shostakovich gives Sergei, as though he were – appropriately – a cock crowing. Sumegi, looking like Stalin and groping his crotch as often as his vodka bottle, is an unashamedly disgusting Boris. Uniquely Russian, the opera is a bleak but uplifting experience.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at The Arts Centre, State Theatre, until May 5

www.opera-australia.org.au

Photo: Jeff Busby