The Excursions of Mr Brouček review

In troubled times, any form of utopia seems appealing. Leoš Janáček’s two-part opera, The Excursions of Mr Brouček, suggests that perfect worlds remain inaccessible, even in dreams. The eponymous petit-bourgeois landlord – a Czech Everyman with a fondness for beer and bragging – longs to escape his mundane reality of property, politicians and (in David Pountney’s revised translation) "@@@@ social media". He travels on a lager-can Pegasus to a moonscape where his cronies appear as idealistic aesthetes, and then to the fifteenth century, where they reappear as partisans in the Hussite Wars. Instead of paradise, Brouček finds only parody – of poetry and patriotism – and a dishonourable death-by-beer-barrel.

How to treat the dichotomous representations of Brouček’s psyche? At Grange Park Opera, Pountney turns Janáček’s whimsical idiosyncrasies into hyperactivity worthy of Baron Münchhausen – spoofing all pretensions. Eurotrash meets Alice in Wonderland in the lunar Act; then, we dive down the rabbit hole via a farcical episode in an underground toilet cubicle in the Hussite scenes. The text sometimes creaks under the weight of its own wit. Boris gets a mention, but not a laugh: some things are beyond satire. 

Act II, with its hymns and doctrinal squabbles, slows the pace to allow scrutiny of the realism behind the mordant rhetoric. Pountney draws a thought-provoking parallel between Czech liberations past and present.

Leslie Travers’ set presents mundane Prague as a pile of tourist tat, which slides apart to transport us to the fantastical – where quixotic, flower-sniffing vegetarians are walking glitter-balls and Hussites are wheeled about on their soapboxes.

Peter Hoare’s Brouček is bigoted and insensitive. But, like Falstaff, the sheer resilience of this craven caitiff garners sympathy, and Hoare’s warm, firm line rises above Brouček’s dull pomposity. Fflur Wyn sings with accuracy and a thrilling shine in her three well-differentiated soprano roles. Quadrupling up, Mark Le Brocq excels as painter Mazal and in other guises – fearlessly and ardently cresting Janáček’s tenor peaks. Andrew Shore, Clive Bayley, Anne-Marie Owens and Adrian Thompson capture the nuances of their various characterisations.

Janáček described his larrikin landlord as a man who drowns his life in a glass of beer. But, the orchestra hints at the potential glories of his gossamer dreams, and it is this dialectic that gives Brouček its Shakespearean hue. 

George Jackson conducts with a firm command of the mosaic score’s mood and meter-changing trickiness. He draws exhilarating rhapsodies from the BBC Concert Orchestra, notably the gorgeous conclusion to Act I when lovers Mazal and Malinka rejoice in their vision of a romantic Prague.

"A lot of us are Broučeks, or were," Janáček wrote. "Just let there be no more of them now." Sadly, entombed in his materialism and solipsism, Brouček seems all too ‘modern’ - a man for our times.