Mazeppa: Tchaikovsky gets a torture-porn makeover

Telegraph

15-06-2025

Surrey's finest fizz – courtesy of nearby vineyard Greyfriars – is the usual tipple of choice at Grange Park Opera, but on a thrilling Saturday night it was vodka, poured neat. The drink is a chaser for Mazeppa, who has already imbibed white powder from a plastic bag hidden in an oversized plush teddy bear.
The eponymous anti-hero of Tchaikovsky's lesser-known opera (1884) is a motorbike-riding man-child who is obsessed with power, violence and women. He's also fanatical about freeing Ukraine, of which he is hetman – a form of governor – from 'the protection of Warsaw' and 'the repression of Moscow'. Based on Pushkin's narrative poem Poltava, Tchaikovsky's interpretation is more Netflix biopic than rigorous historical source. For Ukrainians, Ivan Mazeppa (1687-1708) is a national treasure – he featured on a hryvnia banknote – and the retrieval of this work from the vaults marks solidarity.
Director David Pountney's production eschews hagiography for graphic realism – and this Mazeppa is stronger for it. Act I opens quietly, with a progressive, 1812-like build. There's talk of garlands, some unreciprocated love. So far, so Romantic. Mazeppa (the brilliantly bewigged baritone David Stout) visits his friend, Cossack judge Vasily Kochubey (bass Luciano Batinić) and his daughter Mariya (soprano Rachel Nicholls) to whom he is godfather. He's the type of godparent Hugh Grant describes in the film About A Boy: 'I'll forget her birthdays until her 18th, when I'll take her out and get her drunk and possibly, let's face it, try and shag her'. Mazeppa does that and more, and while Mariya is portrayed as a willing participant (both consent and pleasure in a glorious motorbike scene), her departure from Russia to Ukraine is the catalyst for political crisis.
'The battle lost by Mazeppa is the battle fought today by Zelensky,' writes Philip Bullock, professor of Russian literature and music at the University of Oxford. Battles are bloody, and so is this production. In Act II, we're transported to Mazeppa's dungeon, where Kochubey and his friend Iskra are beaten and waterboarded. Henchmen appear with pliers, a hand-saw, rubber gloves. Fear is in the implication; the detail is in our imagination. A scalpel descends in time for the supper interval. Our return is greeted with a double execution.
Amid this bleak torture porn is some blissful singing. Nicholls, now nursing a large pregnancy bolster, is as dazzling as Mazeppa's gold lamé bedding. In Act III, gas-masked cossacks rise from elevated coffins as zombies, contorted like a Francis Bacon painting. They die again to Tchaikovsky's percussive shots, administered with precision by the English National Opera conducted by Mark Shanahan. The subsequent heartfelt duets are a misnomer; Mazeppa ends in Mariya's madness.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the country's then minister of culture Oleksandr Tkachenko called on the UK to boycott Russian composers until the war was over, writing in a British newspaper that 'We're not talking about cancelling Tchaikovsky, but rather about pausing performances of his works'. Grange Park Opera shows that intelligent engagement has a far greater impact.
In rep until July 6; grangeparkopera.co.uk