Tchaikovsky’s life had a habit of imitating his art. In the spring of 1877, while he was sketching an opera based on Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin – starting, so the story goes, with Tatyana’s letter scene – he received a passionate letter from a former student, Antonina Milyukova, declaring her love. Determined not to turn her away as coldly as Onegin does, he married her that summer. It was a disaster, and within weeks he had fled.
The story itself is simple enough. Tatyana, a bookish country girl, falls for the aloof Onegin, friend of the poet Lensky, who is engaged to her sister Olga. She pours her heart out in a letter; he hands it back with a lecture. At her name-day party a bored Onegin flirts with Olga, Lensky challenges him to a duel, and Onegin kills his friend. Years later he meets Tatyana again, now married to Prince Gremin, and falls for her – too late. She admits she still loves him, but she is determined to stay faithful to her husband, and sends him away. Tchaikovsky called the work “lyrical scenes” rather than an opera, and it shows: this is a story of inner lives rather than grand events.
Patrick Nolan’s new production, which opens Opera North’s season, moves those inner lives into the last years of the Soviet Union and beyond, with each act a step further on: the 1980 Moscow Olympics, perestroika, then the brash new money of the Yeltsin years. It helps to have read the programme first, but the clues are there from the start. In the opening scene, red flags, Lenin and the hammer and sickle – and, pointedly, the blue and yellow of Ukraine – bring jolts of colour to an otherwise drab palette that captures the dour mood of 1980s communist Russia (Olga’s yellow and black polka-dot dress aside).
The Act Two party is a valiant attempt to bring the 1980s into the action: gaudy shell suits, bling and big hair are very much in evidence. But a nervous, almost involuntary laugh from the audience during the dancing gave away the fact that nobody was quite sure whether they were supposed to find it funny. There was no such doubt about Florian Panzieri’s Monsieur Triquet, a cameo with more than a touch of Demis Roussos, played for laughs and getting them.
All four principals are making their Opera North debuts – and on these showings, the company will want them back. In Act Three Onegin describes Tatyana as calm and assured, and that is exactly what Verity Wingate gives us (though with a name like that, she sounds as if she has stepped straight out of a Benjamin Britten dramatis personae). John Brancy is brilliant as Onegin, charting his fall from the swaggering, bored guest at the party, to the man who shoots his best friend, to the desperate suitor begging for the love he once tossed aside. We have little sympathy for him, but Brancy makes such a flawed character entirely convincing.
Caspar Singh’s Lensky towers over the stage, in height as well as presence, and his voice matches his stature: beautiful, controlled and expressive in his Act Two lament before the duel, if perhaps still a little reserved. Jingwen Cai’s Olga combines real fruitiness in the lower register with an impish personality. Joshua Bloom’s Gremin has a bass that seems to rumble up from beneath the floorboards, and the quiet self-assurance of a man who owns half of Siberia – just right for the Yeltsin-era final act.
This is Garry Walker’s final season as Opera North’s Music Director, and on this evidence he will be much missed. The orchestra was splendid under his baton, with the horn solos a particular highlight, and the chorus was on fine form.
So does the concept work? Just about. If the staging sometimes leaves you reaching for the programme, the music never does.
Eugene Onegin is sung in Russian with English titles, and runs at Leeds Grand Theatre until 29th October before touring to Newcastle, Salford and Nottingham.
Reviewer: Mark Humphreys
Reviewed: 11th October 2026
North West End UK Rating: