The Bear review – high spirits and fierce winds fuel Chekhov's duelling lovers

Chekhov’s short play The Bear gave William Walton the basis for his chamber opera, currently being toured by Mid Wales Opera as part of their new Small Stages initiative and Wales’s R17 celebration. While the striking programme design features the snarling bear of the work’s title, there is no actual ursine presence save the boorish bear with a sore head who is Grigory Stepanovich Smirnov. Since the latter name has become synonymous with vodka, perhaps it should not be surprising that the spirit fuels some of the high feelings in Richard Studer’s staging.

Smirnov pays a call on the grieving though spirited young widow Yelena Ivanovna Popova to elicit payment of monies owed by her late husband and sparks begin to fly. Ultimately, Popova’s feisty behaviour – ordering pistols to be fetched as she challenges Smirnov to a duel – only makes him fall in love with her.

The course of this true love hardly runs smooth but it all happens fast, and Walton’s score, stylishly reduced to five instruments – piano, harp, percussion, bassoon and viola/violin – by MWO’s music director Jonathan Lyness, comes across with much character. The piece was first performed in Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall in 1967, the year in which the poet RS Thomas became the vicar of Aberdaron, right on the shore of the Llŷn Peninsula where so much of his great work was written. His church seems an unlikely setting for such a performance, but the beautiful austerity of the building and the wildness of the night – fierce wind added a further dimension to the experience – actually permitted the apparently frivolous yet often sharply insightful observations on human nature to emerge with peculiar clarity. Any contradiction in having the altar before which their marriage might be solemnised hidden behind a cascade of ornate wallpaper and a silhouette portrait of the departed husband was a minor one.

Adam Green’s portrayal succeeds in realising Smirnov’s gamut of emotions, while Carolyn Dobbin’s luscious but always flexible mezzo made the excesses of Madame Popova credible, too. As the outspoken Luka, the lackey of Chekhov’s original, Matthew Buswell’s strong bass-baritone was impressive. The Russian medley of the entertaining but makeweight second half will not be to all tastes, but the not-quite-hour of the Walton is definitely worth going out of your way to see.