At the tender age of 63, the Czech composer Leoš Janáček fell head over heels for a woman he’d met on holiday. She was 40 years his junior, happily married with two children and never returned his rather obsessive affections.

Nevertheless, Janáček inundated Kamila Stösslová with letters and she became his muse for operas, masses, symphonies and song cycles – one of the most enduringly popular of which is the opera Katya Kabanova, published five years after their first encounter.

Victorian Opera’s hero image for Katya Kabanova. Photo supplied

Anyone can read into why the story appealed to him so much. An adaptation of the 1859 play The Storm by Alexander Ostrovsky, it centres a messy love triangle that favours the underdog. The titular Katya is trapped in an unhappy marriage with the weak-willed Tichon (and, by unwilling extension, with his bitter, overbearing mother). When Tichon leaves on business, Katya falls in love with Boris, who has loved her quietly, through it all. As her husband returns and a storm begins to blow in, her guilt starts to consume her.

In Victorian Opera’s upcoming production of Katya Kabanova, staged from 14–16 October at the ornate Palais Theatre in St Kilda, Katya’s perspective is in the spotlight. For director Heather Fairbairn, the fascinating element of the story lies in the protagonist’s psychological unravelling over the course of the work.

“I’ve been really interested in exploring what leads to Katya’s downfall,” Fairbairn tells Limelight. “Her oppression is not fatalistically ordained, it’s something that’s constructed, and imposed and policed by society and those closest to her.”

The opera is an intimate, personal portrait of a woman essentially imploding under societal pressure, she adds. “She’s torn between her longing for love and connection and freedom and the suffocating control of a hypocritical community and family that erodes her sense of self.”

For VO’s Katya, Fairbairn is creating a “memory-scape”, placing the audience into the turbulence of Katya’s psyche. Performed by Desiree Frahn, she’s caged by the psychological rather than the physical. The work features the use of live cameras (operated by Assistant Director Ben Sheen) and projection to paint a portrait of the world “very much from inside her mind”.

Heather Fairbairn in rehearsal for Victorian Opera’s Katya Kabanova. Photo © Casey Horsfield.

“The cameras are tracing Katya’s steps and showing us the world from her point of view – tracing through her memories or projecting into the future. Different imagery appears, created live with cast members in the peripheral areas of the stage. When she dreams about her lover, Boris, he’s off to the side looking into the live camera, so in the video work we see what Katya is seeing inside her head.”

The cinematic elements have been part of Fairbairn’s conception of the work from the very beginning. They provide a solution to a puzzle raised early in production: how can you stage such an intimate story within the “large-scale, rather cavernous” Palais?

“We faced two options. We could either close down the space – mask the gold proscenium, create a tunnel-vision focus on the intimacy of the story – or magnify the action to match the scale of the venue. Given the Palais’s history as a cinema, we decided to blow the action up,” explains Fairbairn.

The design team – including production designer Savanna Wegman, lighting designer Niklas Pajanti and video designer Robert Brown – draws on the Czech New Wave cinema movement for inspiration. Fairbairn cites films such as Daisies, Fruit of Paradise and the surrealist Marketa Lazarová among the influences.

The Volga River is represented by a mirrored floor, adding a surreal sheen to the onstage action, and the set includes elements of living foliage that “transform and erode” in a particular way as Katya’s psyche frays.

Limelight has promised not to spoil the surprise, but the design twist and live camera work introduce an unpredictable element to the way the production unfolds – which, for Fairbairn, perfectly encapsulates Katya’s deteriorating mind.

“The set is stripped back. There are these oppressive structures symbolising social systems of control, and punctuations of natural motifs – reeds and florals trying to burst through and reclaim the space. That represents Katya’s wildness, as she tries to reclaim her autonomy. Those two forces are in constant battle,” says Fairbairn.

Desiree Frahn in rehearsal for Victorian Opera’s Katya Kabanova. Photo © Casey Horsfield.

Katya is Fairbairn’s first foray into Czech opera, and she’s delighted to be doing it. Smetana’s The Bartered Bride was the first opera she ever saw with her grandmother back in the UK.

The appeal for her lies in Janáček’s naturalism. The Storm is one of the first naturalistic operas ever written, she explains, and Janáček too, eschews traditional operatic forms to better serve the text.

“I’m especially drawn to how this piece really marries [opera and theatre] – sometimes they can be two quite different beasts, but this piece really is a work of music theatre and theatre together. It doesn’t follow the usual operatic structures of recitative then aria; rather, it traces the dialogue of the play. So it’s more like melodic speech woven through – very much like a song-play, essentially,” she says.

Discarding operatic convention makes Janáček’s music “really alive and immediate, raw and real”. Spanning a musical vocabulary from bare, folk-inspired songs to Romantic symphonic highs, the score strikes with emotional directness.

“It’s much more visceral and immediate – like watching a soap opera, almost. And in that way, it really is an incredible celebration of Czech culture, because it’s Czech language with these Czech folk songs woven through it, by a Czech composer, based on a real-life unrequited love story. And our starting point of Czech New Wave with the live camerawork… Touch wood it’ll all work out!”

Victorian Opera presents Katya Kabanova at the Palais Theatre, St Kilda, Melbourne 14–16 October.