Eastern bloc

There was a fad a while back for photo books about Eastern bloc architecture. Derelict megastructures, brutalist monuments; you couldn’t move for them in the Barbican gift shop. Anyhow, Patrick Nolan and Leslie Travers – the director and designer respectively of Opera North’s new production of Eugene Onegin – were presumably big fans, because they’ve relocated the action to a provincial sports centre in the dying years of the USSR. It’s a fairly common gambit with Slavic operas. British opera companies are surely world leaders, by now, at rendering faded paintwork and water-stained concrete. But why?