Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk has never been for the faint of heart, packed to the gills with sexual violence and murder. It’s little wonder it was roundly condemned by Stalin, earning the now notorious Pravda editorial headed “Muddle instead of Music.”

Paris Opera’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Photo © Bernd Uhlig/Opéra National de Paris

Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production for the Paris Opera, screening at selected theatres across Australia, is an unflinching, potent excavation of this brutal work. Forget the comforts of a successful mercantile family – he places our anti-heroine, Katerina Ismailova, in the slaughterhouse of her boorish father-in-law. The set fairly reeks of blood, so replete is it with animal carcasses and cold, sharp steel.

While Warlikowski’s productions have sometimes felt more cerebral than dramatically attuned in years past, there’s no charging him with that here: this staging has a primal, nightmarish logic that hurtles, awfully, toward the inevitable devastation of that fourth act. He does full justice to this agonising story of a deeply unhappy woman, neglected by her cold fish husband, tormented by his loutish father and stuck in a community whose residents always have their ears pressed to the door.