I promised a couple of posts ago to post my views on the Robert Lepage
Rake's Progress, if I had the chance to get in. Well, I got in last Tuesday and secured a ticket, and what's more: I got it for free! I was queuing in the ticket shop, hoping for a last minute ticket, and a man came by and offered me a ticket. I wanted to pay him for it, but he refused and walked away... Third balcony, frontal view, totally free. My lucky day!
I had a lovely evening. I knew the opera quite well beforehand, so I was curious for this alternative setting. As you may already know, Lepage and his Ex Machina group set it in California in the forties, when and where the opera was conceived. Father Trulove is an oil tycoon, Anne Trulove his all-American daughter, Tom Rakewell a young and brisk cowboy type-of-guy, Nick Shadow an oil driller (well, he makes his entrance by crawling out of the ground, covered in oil; I think the symbolism is clear...
). Rural England becomes rural America: large plains and those big oil drills... Wait, here is a picture:
This is the first scene. I must say, every stage image is without exception very beautiful. (By the way, the clouds move.) Lastly, decadent 18th century London becomes Los Angeles in the forties: Hollywood, glitter and glamour, cult of fame, all that. Tom Rakewell is a film star and Nick Shadow his an agent/producer,... This picture might be revealing too:
The transition of the original setting to this new one was very clever and consistent all through. The group made use of some very ingenious technical tricks to support their new setting - lots of 'oohs' and 'aahs' from the audience, even a little applause on one occasion. They were impressive and amusing... but..., I felt, had little or nothing to do with the opera, the
story, the genuine human story that is supposed to be told.
I wasn’t much impressed by the first half: it went by without any noticeable
dramatical events. (The music was great though, all the way through, marvellous playing from the La Monnaie Orchestra under Kazushi Ono. I hope Thomas Adès will do similar in Covent Garden.)
My major grief is this: I found that the original story got obscured by the clever finds of the new setting – you’d expect a good production would
bring out the dramatic potential of an opera. For me
The Rake’s Progress is a
true and
human story of an ambitious, but somewhat passive, frivolous young man, lured by richness and easy living, getting lost the busy life of the great city - meaningless sex, drink, empty friendships, what not,... - becoming a shadow of his former self, 'disdaining his true love'. It's about love, folly, guilt, regret and in the end redemption of some sort...
All these thing didn’t come to the foreground of this production. The main focus is on the new setting, the decor, the technicalities, but the story is left behind... I must admit, some good thinking went into the clever transformation of the original setting, but I wish an equal amount of concentration had gone to the acting, the characters, the dramatic situations,... Scene after scene passed by this way, without making nothing but a superficial impression.
Maybe this was due to a lack in acting skills in some singers, I don’t know... Tom Rakewell was sung by Andrew Kennedy, Laura Claycomb was Anne Trulove and William Shimell sang Shadow. Maybe it was just Andrew Kennedy who, in my humble opinion (I have great respect for
any opera singer – to be able to sing an opera the whole way to the end is an enormous achievement) wasn't really able to carry the role. Shadow came across very well as a devilish and manipulative character, Anne as innocent and good at heart. But somehow Tom Rakewell was a bit... colourless. His great London aria for example ('Vary the song...'): sadness, guilt, weariness, mocking, rage,... With Kennedy, it all looked a bit the same. His acting seemed to restrict itself to three gestures the director must have learned him. I'm not being cynical: three selfsame gestures appeared again and again: a sort of downwards beating-gesture with his right hand, as if to support a point he's making; holding both hands up, every time he would deny something, or refuse, or the like... and then an infinite wriggling about with his head whenever he was interacting with another character. He was very lively, but, dare I say it, a bit superficial. You didn't get the impression that he really meant what he was saying, of really felt what he was supposed to feel. It wasn't true, genuine.
I’m being hard. All this just to make the point that maybe a Tom Rakewell who would act genuinely, so you can really feel for him, would make enormous difference for the production. (I see at Covent Garden you have a different cast.)
Just another little grunt. The production didn’t give nearly enough attention to the
text, regrettably, for the libretto by Auden and Kallman is pure poetry, IMO. But there was no place for the poetry – there was very little in the scenery that referred to the text (no spring, no carriage, no London, no Baba-the-Turk-collector thingies,...), because the very eloquent, poetical, laboured language – no doubt a bit of a pastiche on classical opera libretti? - didn’t fit the characters at all. Out of the mouths of rural/industrial Americans or flashy film stars the language sounded hopelessly archaic and
wrong – I fear that if this production was your introduction to
The Rake’s , you would deem the opera ok, but the text rather dull and old fashioned, which would be a sad loss. I’ve had this before with Ex Machina, I saw their production of
The Beggar’s opera: marvellously inventive and entertaining, but the text fell aside – a dead, archaic object in a shiny, ingenious new production. I’d expect a good production would liven up the text and make the story and the situations clear. In the case of
The Beggar’s Opera, which I had never seen before, I didn't understand a thing of the story. Which is odd, after seeing a production of it.
But I must end this rather excessive review on a positive note. The second half was
much better, the production finally began to
serve the story, and gradually I was sucked into the drama, finally. The arrival of Anne in London is one of the scenes where the new setting really works for the story and the situations; the auction scene was amusing; and the two last scenes were absolutely splendid. The Graveyard scene truly chilling and an effective use of the new setting, and then, that last scene... my word... It was heartbreaking - so true and small and vulnerable... I
loved Kennedy for the duration of this scene. I could say a lot about this last scene, but my post is already
way too long. In short: the new ideas this production brought to the scene
worked - maybe not accidentely this is the first scene were the Hollywood-analogy doesn't play any role anymore (well, a very little one).
So, in conclusion, rather mixed thoughts, but I would certainly go and see it for yourself (if it was only for the very attractive pool boy and girl during the auction scene... you'll see
)
