Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Birmingham Opera Company, Tower Ballroom, review: effing, blinding and flamboyant theatrics

In 1994, I saw an unforgettably powerful staging of Shostakovich’s satire at the Met in New York, with the great Maria Ewing mesmerising as the titular character who falls in love with one of her husband’s factory workers and is driven to murder. It was directed by Graham Vick, who now returns to the piece a quarter of a century later in rather different circumstances.

Birmingham Opera Company, very much Vick’s concept, uses a core of professionals alongside singing and acting community groups that also provide backstage and front-of-house volunteers. Every production takes place in one of the city’s empty warehouses or dilapidated public buildings – this year it’s based on the banks of the Edgbaston reservoir at the Tower Ballroom, a much-loved dance hall of the rock 'n' roll era that has gone to pot and withered under planning blight .The audience promenades, with Vick and his associates shepherding it to different locations as the action requires.

Vick shows the strategic skills of the first Duke of Marlborough as he marshals his forces across the dance floor. Commandeering the bars, the stage, the glitter ball, the exits and entrances, he presents a flamboyantly theatrical realisation of the opera, relocated from the early 19th-century Russia provinces to some indeterminate modern urban nightmare, where existence is corrupt, merciless and amoral.