ONSTAGE
What: Jenufa
When: Thursday, 8 p.m. (runs through Oct. 22)
Where: Royal Theatre
Tickets: $25-$165 at rmts.bc.ca, by phone at 250-386-6121, or in person
Timothy Vernon is feeling especially anxious as Pacific Opera Victoria — the company he founded in 1979 — heads into its season-opening weekend.
“There’s always fresh reason to be scared to death,” he says with a chuckle.
In this case, it’s the première for one of the company’s most ambitious projects: Jenufa, a somewhat harrowing opera by Czech composer Leos Janácek that is based on a century-old play, Její Pastorkyna (Her Stepdaughter), by Czech playwright Gabriela Preissová.
Though the challenging but celebrated opera (pronounced Yen-afa) is presented with English surtitles, the opera is sung entirely in Czech, with a speech rhythm practically unique to Janácek.
Vernon describes Jenufa as overwhelming, unusual and extremely intense. “This was a successful but controversial play in its day,” Vernon said. “Janácek seized on it and decided to turn it into an opera. He didn’t ask for a rhyming libretto or anything; he just took the dialogue. It’s natural speech, which gives it a different flavour, as well. It’s not rhyming couplets.”
Vernon called upon a longtime friend to assist with the production — two-time Academy Award nominee Atom Egoyan. The Victoria-raised director and screenwriter had wanted to collaborate with Pacific Opera for many years, but it wasn’t until Vernon floated the idea of Egoyan directing the Janácek classic that he cleared his schedule to do so.
Jenufa marks the first time in 40 years that Egoyan has been involved with a theatrical production on his home turf. “I thought he would have much more important things to do,” Vernon said with a laugh. “But he was always so strong and positive about the company, so I finally said: ‘Look, Atom, what can we think of together that you might be interested in?’ The minute I mentioned Jenufa, he lit up.”
The director, who earned two Academy Award nominations for his 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter, arrived in Victoria three weeks ago to begin rehearsals. He has seen several Pacific Opera shows over the years, and is a big fan of Vernon, so he knew he would be in good hands when he arrived. “Everything is at a really high level,” Egoyan said, from a rehearsal space in Victoria’s Baumann Centre for Opera. “It’s great to see the company thriving at a time when a lot of opera companies are not.”
Egoyan’s version of the 113-year-old opera is set in the present day. It was an easy switch to make, he said, as the deceptively simple plot remains relevant. “It’s the examination of a relationship that is embedded with the ghosts of so many other relationships,” Egoyan said. “But what has gone on behind the plot, why these characters are there, what their lives have been, who they have had kids with — the train wreck of their previous lives — comes back to haunt them in a really particular way. And it results in extreme action. At the time [of its release in 1904], it was controversial. And it remains so.”
Pacific Opera Victoria staged another Janácek opera, Cunning Little Vixen, seven years ago, with positive results, according to Vernon. Jenufa presents a far greater challenge, however.
“It’s not something where we can expect the public to go: ‘Oh, Jenufa! I’ve got to go.’ But I’m hoping people respond to the work. It’s very challenging — it’s a hard opera. And it’s hard for the singers, who had to learn Czech more or less by rote — nobody in the cast speaks it.”
The Barber of Seville this is not, but that is exactly what drew Egoyan to the project. As a filmmaker, he prefers to zero in on relationships, to shine a light on the minutiae of human interaction. Jenufa — so rich in its emotional to-and-fro that The Guardian newspaper called it a “bomb-proof” production — gives Egoyan plenty of opportunity.
The character of Kostelnicka, an influential member of the church and one of two strong female leads in the opera, represents a stern moral authority, but with a dark side that is revealed in the opera’s second act. The complex relationship between Kostelnicka and her step-daughter Jenufa is at the core of the piece, Egoyan said.
“There is something that happens in this opera that is so extreme. If I can make that character empathetic, and make you understand something about her, and the nature of that act, it’s powerful.”
The last time Egoyan was involved with a theatrical production in Victoria was in 1977, while he was a student at Mount Douglas Secondary. The student production of The End of Solomon Grundy for the Greater Victoria Drama Festival was a proud moment for Egoyan, who still has a plaque from the festival. (Egoyan said he also kept a “very nice” rejection letter from the Belfry Theatre, which turned down the opportunity to produce one of his first plays in the early 1980s.)
Egoyan screened his first short film as a director, Lust of a Eunuch, at the Greater Victoria Art Gallery in the summer of 1978. But theatre was his first love. “When I left Mount Doug, I thought that’s what I wanted to do — be a playwright. I wasn’t really educated in film.”
Success as a filmmaker would come first for Egoyan, but he slowly returned to theatre and opera. In 1996, he directed a Toronto production of the Canadian Opera Company’s Salome, which led to a succession of operatic projects, from Wagner’s Die Walküre to productions for South Carolina’s Spoleto Festival, one of the most enduring and acclaimed performing arts festivals in the world.
In 2013, Egoyan’s two worlds — the stage and the screen — accidentally collided. He was at the Spoleto Festival in 2013 showcasing his opera Feng Yi Ting when the shooting schedule for his film Devil’s Knot was unexpectedly moved up to accommodate the pregnancy of its star, Reese Witherspoon. Egoyan spent weeks commuting between South Carolina and Atlanta to see both projects through, an experience he isn’t eager to repeat.
“It just knocked me out. I thought: ‘This can’t happen again.’ ”
Egoyan’s schedule isn’t as tight now, but he always has several projects on the go, which requires a significant amount of planning to avoid conflicts. It’s an approach that served him well with Jenufa.
“So much of my job as a director, in film or theatre, is to pre-visualize. I need to work with the designer a year in advance to have an idea and to present that and to work on it. I have to feel confident that when I come into rehearsals, that design is going to hold.
“I’m coming from a very low-budget tradition. If I don’t have a plan, I’m sunk.”
