The Golden Cockerel

English Touring Opera return to Norwich Theatre Royal as part of their Spring 2022 Tour, performing Puccini's 'La Bohème' and Rimsky-Korsakov's 'The Golden Cockerel'. It is a tour that sees them visit fourteen English theatres - they began in February at London's Hackney Empire and conclude in Cumbria in June at the Ulveston Coronation Hall, thereby maintaining their claim to be the UK's leading touring opera company.

However, as they arrive in Norwich we are bang in the middle of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival, this year celebrating its 250th anniversary, and pulling out all their stops to fill the fortnight with shows and events that will surely appeal to an overlapping audience. Which might well explain the sight of a few empty seats at the Theatre Royal on Friday evening. Even with the best will in the world, Norwich's culture lovers cannot be in two places at once.

'The Golden Cockerel' was the last of the fifteen operas written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and is probably the best known. Based on a 19th century fairy tale verse by Alexander Pushkin, the Russian composer completed it shortly before his death in 1908. Famously satirizing the court of Tsar Nicholas II, and reflecting both the King's perceived ineptitude and the domestic discontent generated by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, the opera faced problems with censorship. 'The Golden Cockerel' consequenty did not receive its Moscow premiere until 1909.

English Touring Opera could not have predicted how closely in 2022 expansionist policies in Russia would mirror the Tsar's warmongering campaign, or anticipate that their first performance of 'The Golden Cockerel' would take place one week after Russian forces entered Ukraine. However, tonight's show was prefaced by a sur-titled dedication to the people of Ukraine, and to those in Russia protesting against Putin's war of aggression, and this gesture of solidarity was met with appreciative applause from the Norwich audience.

For this production, Vladimir Belsky's original libretto is replaced by the English translation written by James Gibson and Antal Dorati for New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1945. This was my first disappointment. Having listened to the opera in the original Russian, I was not fully prepared for the Gilbert-esque rhyming-couplet laced lyrics that accompany this production, and would even question the need for sur-titling at all. What would have been a useful tool with which to offer an English translation became, quite frankly, an unecessary distraction.

The stage is well-lit, but sparsely furnished – the crow's nest (or, should I say, cock's nest) that towers above the King's bed becomes draped in Act 2 to form a battlefield seduction tent for the Queen of Shemakha. A bizarre range of stage props include a wheeled rocking horse for the Queen to ride upon, and a gun carriage with strangely phallic cannon, complete with extendable barrel.

However, the cast and chorus acquit themselves admirably, with Grant Doyle's fat-suited King Dodon hitting the legato and still managing to fluster and bluster with comedic incompetence. He is foiled wonderfully by Edward Hawkin as his general, Polkan. The somewhat static seduction scene is, vocally, filled with coloratura and passion thanks to Paula Side's deliciously exotic Queen of Shemakha, and contrasts markedly with the chirrupy 'Cock-a-doodle-do's' and animated actions of Alys Mererid Roberts as the eponymous Golden Cockerel. Robert Lewis, as The Astrologer, adds an air of magic and mystery, as well as providing slow and ponderous intrigue between acts.

With James Conway's direction and Gerry Cornelius' conducting, 'The Golden Cockerel' is most definitely in safe hands but, for me, the disappointment in the evening lies with the choice of libretto rather than with any individual performance. But this is more than compensated by the warmth and exoticism of the musical score, a real credit considering the size of the orchestra, who help deliver an authentic flavour of the orient.

And, as The Astrologer intriguingly points out in the epilogue, 'What you saw was an illusion, only the Queen and I were real'.