Jenufa review, Royal Opera House, London: The orchestra under Henrik Nanasi’s direction plays a blinder

Claus Guth’s Royal Opera production of Janacek’s Jenufa was scheduled to open in March 2020, but was aborted at the last moment by Covid. Better late than never. It has now opened, and it makes a stunning evening.

But it starts slowly. In what looks like a white-walled industrial sweatshop, rows of identically clad female automata are peeling potatoes while the dysfunctional family whom the story is about bicker centre-stage. We are asked to accept this arid piece of Teutonic stylisation as taking place in a remote Moravian village 100 years ago. There is no sense of time or place; the figures on stage might be in some mad scientist’s laboratory. But Guth has a plan, which he reveals only gradually.

The plot concerns Steva, a dissolute young mill-owner whom all the girls fancy, and his fiancée Jenufa, whom his half-brother Laca also loves. Jenufa’s foster-mother, known as the Kostelnicka (a female sacristan), wants to protect her from the effects of Steva’s drunkenness. But Jenufa is expecting Steva’s child, and is desperate to avert scandal in this tightly conventional community by marrying him. His refusal to do so triggers tragedy. Her mother forces her to give birth in secret; to protect her daughter’s reputation she gives her a sleeping drug and murders the child. But she’s not clever enough to properly hide the body, which surfaces next spring when the winter ice melts…