“Is this a fairy tale or reality? Reality or fairy tale?” Leoš Janáček’s heavy-eyed Forester steps out of his role towards the end of The Cunning Little Vixen and poses the very question we in the audience have been battling with all evening. From the first bracken-drenched chord we are plunged into a world of Moravian ambiguity – left to boggle at the anthropomorphic shenanigans set in motion by a plucky frog, as he hops into the sleeping Forester’s lap.

Stripped of the sylvan staging and lavish costumes we usually associate with Vixen, in this semi-staging at the Barbican Hall director Peter Sellars looked to more subversive means in order to conjure that heady, dream-like landscape – and blur the tragicomic lines between animal and human. Is the Forester still at slumber when he writhes sensuously on the floor with the adolescent Vixen? Are animals so sexually liberal that the Fox and Vixen must be married immediately after mating? Is the violence exhibited by Harašta confined to his humanity, or an element within nature itself? This equivocacy is, of course, entirely to Janáček's point, and Sellars expertly pinpoints Vixen’s satire on the shifting values of western culture.

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Read the full review on Bachtrack