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Thursday 20 November 2008

Road to nowhere

Lost Highway
Young Vic

Aci, Galathea e Polifemo
Middle Temple

Anyone who finds any of this interesting shouldn’t. It’s no good writing about ‘psychogenic fugue’, in which an individual takes leave of his physical surroundings; nor does Neuwirth help by telling us, ‘I have always been interested in the human soul, what’s there in the inner world of a person,’ when the last thing any of these figures give any indication of having is a soul. They very evidently have sex rather than making love. Being mostly silent doesn’t guarantee that anything at all, let alone anything deep, is going on within. And where in other operas one would point to the contribution of the music, as indicating an intense or complex inner life, that would be impossible with Lost Highway, because the music, whether instrumental or electronic, rides roughshod over anything the characters might be saying or doing, the only exception being when Mr Eddy, the sinister mobster, breaks into a coloratura aria of hatred against smoking in a garage, the effect being somewhat comic, and suggestive of an hysterical personality chiefly disguised as being wreathed in smiles.

The movie is an object of devotion, utterly unwarranted, in fact one of the most tedious I have ever seen. The opera, though based more closely on it than one would have believed possible, is much more interesting because you sit waiting to see how it brings off the movie’s tiresome effects one after another. I’m afraid people will talk about a meditation on the mysteries of identity, and more of the claptrap Lynch and Neuwirth invite. We know that both are capable of genuinely creative work, but this, or these, are the empty gesturings of artists who have lost any capacity for self-criticism.

It made me nostalgic for the evening earlier in the week when I saw a semi-staged Aci, Galathea e Polifemo at the Middle Temple Hall, part of this year’s Handel Festival. This fairly charming early work doesn’t have an idea in its head, but at least it doesn’t pretend to. The three singers tended to overact and undersing, and Laurence Cummings’s conducting was as usual free of incident. As so often in Handel’s dramatic works, the music gets better towards the close, and he stages here one of his earliest hesitating tragic scenes. If only he let his characters interact instead of mainly proceeding in parallel lines! But Handel is always at least the consummate professional, and it was an inoffensive musical occasion in surroundings of splendour.

More articles from: Michael Tanner | this section

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