Leoš Janáček
Kát’a Kabanová
Opera in three acts; music by Leoš Janáček, libretto by Leoš Janáček based on a Czech translation of Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky’s play The Thunderstorm, orchestra conducted by Edward Gardner, direction by Richard Jones, Royal Opera, Monday 4th February 2019, reviewed by Leslie Jones
All of the characters in Kát’a Kabanová, with the exception of the carefree, courting couple Varvara and Kudrjáš, are, in Dylan’s words, “bent out of shape by society’s pliers”. They are either inauthentic and hypocritical, like Dikoj and Kabanicha, or conflicted and tormented, like Kát’a and Boris. And most of the men are weak and compliant, especially Tichon Kabanov, who is dominated by his mother, and Boris, who is financially dependent on his uncle Dikoj and who tamely accepts the latter’s instructions to depart for Siberia.
Kát’a herself is a complex, child-like individual, who has visionary experiences and hears voices. In Act one, she confides to Varvara that her mother treated her like a doll, yet that she was then “free as a bird”. But married life has made her wither. With her dreams of flying, her ineffectual struggle to deny her sexuality and her tendency to project inner urges onto external agencies such as fate, Kát’a is a case study. As Christopher Wintle observes, “The tragedy of Kát’a is that she instinctively shares the oppressive moral values of the community to which she is bound…” (What Opera Means). She claims to love her verbally abusive and controlling mother-in-law, “You are like a mother to me”, she submissively informs her. There is no escape, then, from the super ego, the repressive representative of society in your head. Continue reading
Cell Phones
Credit, College of Community Innovation and Education, Megan Small Story
Cell Phones
by Bill Hartley
The governor of a women’s prison once confided that she preferred middle aged men for her senior management team and that she was prepared to fly in the face of Equal Opportunities to get them. In her view, most women are in jail because they mix with the wrong men. She even provided a mini bus to take discharged prisoners to the local railway station. But not from altruism. Rather, she had become tired of watching forlorn women waiting for the promised lift home from men who didn’t show up. She realised that what most women prisoners lack in their lives is a positive male role model and she set about providing them. ‘After all’, as one of her team told me, ‘handle them wrongly and some are quite capable of barricading in a cell and feeding bits of themselves under the door’. Self-harm is one of the principal ways by which distraught women express their distress.
All of this came to mind, on reading that the Prison Service is planning to provide in-cell phones for prisoners. A predictable storm of outrage ensued in the press, together with comments about making jail ‘soft’. Equally predictably, the Prison Service responded that the scheme would be carefully controlled; only approved numbers could be dialled and the idea was to reduce the sense of isolation and incidents of self-harm. This hostile response was inevitable. The Prison Service and the Ministry of Justice have never sought to get the public onside when it comes to rehabilitation. The Service lacks a coherent, overarching approach. Instead, we see add-on proposals which are badly received when they go public. Continue reading →
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