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Sunday 7 September 2008

Road to nowhere

Lost Highway
Young Vic

Aci, Galathea e Polifemo
Middle Temple

Olga Neuwirth’s Lost Highway, which was first performed in October 2003 in Graz, gets its first UK outing at the Young Vic in a production by ENO. It is impossible to imagine it being better done, and the roar of applause which greeted it at the end of its unbroken 90 minutes was, I hope, mainly evoked by the perfection of the execution. So many things could have gone wrong, and none of them did. The set consists of a black strip reaching from one side of the auditorium to the other, wide enough to cope with a car, as it does; and above it a large Plexiglass cube, containing a spiral staircase which is lowered for the characters to descend to the lost highway, or raised so other characters can intrude. There are four huge screens on which moving images, sometimes the same, sometimes not, are displayed throughout. The orchestra plays high on one side, and there is all the apparatus of electronic amplification. There is always something to look at, and a great deal — in purely quantitative terms — to hear. Thanks to this elaborate and flawless production, I wasn’t bored, as I had been, hideously, by the movie.

It is, of course, a cult movie, and has many of that genre’s crucial elements: the audience is underinformed throughout about who the characters are, what their motives might be, and why one should take the least interest in them; dialogue is sparse and inconsequential; the most bizarre happenings are left wholly unexplained; the ending is no ending at all, just carrying on along that lost highway, which is a metaphor for...

One performer plays the two main female roles, with contrasting wigs. Two performers play what may or may not be the main male role: the miserable jazz trumpeter (saxophonist in the movie), who, according to a video of unknown provenance, brutally murders his wife, with whom he has been having dispassionate sex, is sentenced to death, but when a prison guard looks into the cell the murderer has been replaced by a young mechanic, and though there is some bewilderment, he is soon free and able to begin an affair with the second woman, who might just be the same only with a different name and hair colour. In the first half, which goes up to the imprisonment, there is only speaking over a fairly noisy amplified background of stupefyingly uninteresting music; when the youthful replacement has appeared, the performers sing, though mostly not in a demanding way. There is another character who doubles throughout as a man who is alleged to be dead, and a grinning sinister mobster whose girlfriend the leading woman seems to be.

More articles from: Michael Tanner | this section

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