Katie Mitchell and her feminist statement in ‘Jen?fa’, an unmissable event at Les Arts in 2023

Les Arts

 Katie Mitchell and her feminist statement 'Jen?fa', an unmissable event at Les Arts in 2023 

• Katie Mitchell's staging reclaims the original work on which Leoš Janáček based his denunciation of violence against women.
• The stage director sets this drama, in which betrayal, murder, love, and forgiveness converge, firmly in the 21st century.

Valencia (29.12.22). Les Arts begins its 2023 opera season with the premiere of 'Jenšfa' by Leoš Janáček on January 19, a feminist statement set in contemporary society, directed by the prestigious British stage director Katie Mitchell.

'Jen?fa' is a story about women, "which focuses entirely on the female experience," as Mitchell explains. "It's an incredibly modern opera, because it's not common for an opera conceived in the 19th century to have so many female characters on stage. Three generations of women play the lead role, and I added a fourth generation by having a young girl play the role of the youngest son in the final scene."

The opera is based on 'His Stepdaughter', a heartbreaking 19th-century play written by Czech playwright Gabriela Preissovà, in which betrayal, murder, love and forgiveness converge in a portrait so realistic and brutal about rural women that it caused a real shock at its premiere in 1890.

“The lives of the female characters reflect those times and their social class: they depend on violent men who are in turn hurt, usually drunk and used to solving everything with violence,” he recalls.

“One of the main conflicts in the opera is between the stepmother, Kostelnika, and her stepdaughter, Jenůfa,” explains the British director. In order to guarantee her a better future, Kostelnika has raised the young woman under a strict upbringing, which, however, will not prevent her from becoming the victim of a cruel love triangle.

Courted by Laca, she is nevertheless seduced by her attractive and fickle stepbrother, Števa, with whom she becomes pregnant. Jenůfa's hopes of marriage are dashed when Števa abandons her after Laca disfigures the young woman in a jealous rage.

To try to save her reputation and marry Laca, her stepmother commits infanticide. But the baby's body is discovered on the wedding day, and faced with the crowd's anger against the young woman, Kostelnića confesses her crime, obtaining Jenēfa's forgiveness, who then begins her new life as a married woman.

In her approach to 'Jen?fa', Katie Mitchell emphasizes the feminist vision of Gabriela Preissovà's original text and places the epicenter of the conflict between the two women in the atrocious damage suffered by the stepmother in the past and society's failure to protect her from violent men.

“The fact that the story could happen right now is chilling,” explains Mitchell, who opts for a hyperrealistic montage, which moves Janáşek’s rural drama to a present-day Moravia, with technology, desktop computers, camera phones, where Jenşfa works as an administrative assistant and lives with her stepmother in a caravan full of crucifixes, but where violent acts against women and abusive relationships are still present.

Katie Mitchell 

Critics hailed Katie Mitchell in 2016 as 'the queen of British theatre in exile'. In a thirty-year career, Mitchell has directed over 100 shows, more than 70 theatrical productions, and nearly 30 operas.

Her feminist interventions in the classical canon of theatre and opera are, likewise, considered the closest thing that British theatre has to an auteur.

Award-winning and recognized in Europe and the United States, Mitchell won the International Opera Award for Best Direction in 2019 for this production of 'Jen?fa' which Les Arts will present from January 19 to 29.