NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

Director Netta Yashchin is quick to point out the sex factor. “The show is contemporary. It will feature ten female dancers in outrageously sexy outfits!” With an opera based on Dostoyevsky’s dark Notes From Underground, viewed by many as fiction’s first existential novel, set in Darlinghurst’s ominous-sounding Cell Block Theatre, you can see why she’s keen to amp up the aphrodisia. “There is no attempt to make a period piece here but rather a metaphorical associative journey into a surreal and dreamlike existence,” Yashchin continues. It really could be no other way, with Dostoyevsky’s narrator being an unreliable, rambling and bitter man, his diary rife with impenetrable riddles and rants against Western society. The Soviet government unsurprisingly disapproved of its anti-utopianism, while it found many famous fans in other quarters: Sartre, Nietzsche, even Paul Schrader, the writer responsible for Taxi Driver and one of celluloid’s most iconic anti-heroes. “Australia is full of false heroes Home and Away style. Heroes that have nothing to offer to young people in terms of real evolution as human beings,” says Yashchin. And the Russians do deeply troubled, cantankerously human studies so well (Gogol’s Diary of a Madman being a neat and timely parallel.) “I migrated from the USSR to Israel in 1975. Hopefully I will be able to communicate some of the Russian humor to the audiences … [it] can be easily lost in translation. Especially for Australian audiences that perceive existential issues as dark.” In this adaptation by the fledgling Sydney Chamber Opera (this the company’s second show), the narrator’s voice has been split into Aboveground and Underground – Underground being the same man, but 20 years older. “Aboveground man unfolded all the action for us: his relationships with the people around him: the incident with the officer, the friends at the hotel de Paris, his encounter with Liza his lover and Muse.” Sexy outfits aside, there will be plenty to spice up this heritage listed cell-block cum stage. “No cliché opera shticks were allowed.”

Feb 14, 17 & 20, Cell Block Theatre, National Art School, Forbes St, Darlinghurst, $30-50, 1300 GET TIX, moshtix.com.au