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Sunday 7 September 2008

Torment of languor

The Rake's Progress (Royal Opera House)

It’s easy to see the way opera Inszenierung is going. We are in for a spate of US-located productions, just as we emerge from 19th-century industrial locations and nondescript car parks. Hollywood, Las Vegas, the prairies, Texas oilfields and the omnipresence of TV, something we are hardly likely to forget, are where Poppea, Giulio Cesare, Die Zauberflöte, Norma, all of Verdi and Wagner, Peter Grimes will find themselves next. Within a week two such disparate pieces as Candide and The Rake’s Progress have received broadly similar treatment, the locations dictating, to a large extent, the kind of characters and the range of their motivations. Absurd in Candide, this was wholly undermining of Rake, if it hadn’t already been a failure on musical grounds. It’s an opera with one of the most celebrated and overrated libretti, which naturally, being mainly written by Auden, contains many a memorable phrase, but is arch, badly constructed dramatically, and gives us a set of characters in whom there is no reason to feel any interest until very late in the day.

Robert Lepage’s appalling production, which is shared with four other leading opera houses, violates the ethos of the work by setting the opening pastoral — ‘The pious earth observes the solemn year’ and so on, a brilliant evocation of 18th-century England, with the element of pastiche which is so crucial to the whole work brought to the fore — in Texas, specifically recalling the set of Giant down to the contours of the distant house, here a cute model with lights going on in various rooms. Tom Rakewell as a cowboy, Nick Shadow arriving to promise him a big media career, the show becoming a send-up of Celeb. Culture, among other things. But then there are all those references to London, and we even see some London cops, but in LA. Probably we need to invoke postmodernism, which conveniently, since it means nothing, observes no rigours of time or place.

More articles from: Deborah Ross | this section

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