Already a subscriber? Log in
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has been having dispassionate sex, is sentenced to death, but when a prison guard looks into the cell the murderer has been replaced by a young mechanic, and though there is some bewilderment, he is soon free and able to begin an affair with the second woman, who might just be the same only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.
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.
Also in Arts Reviews
Also by Michael Tanner
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in