Annabel Arden's new staging of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress for English National Opera is a brave, flawed stab at one of the more daunting 20th-century works of music theatre. Premiered in 1951, the opera takes Hogarth's pictures as the starting point for a Faustian parable about the roles of sex, love and money in society. Lured by the demonic Nick Shadow, Tom Rakewell abandons Anne Trulove to embark on a career of profligacy. Anne's selfless decision to stand by him ultimately saves his soul, but not his sanity. Stravinsky, at his most severely neoclassical, uses the theatrical conceits and the musical structures of 18th-century opera as Brechtian alienation effects. The result is coolly dispassionate, a work that throws few emotional punches until we get to the final scenes, by which time, for many, it's too late.
Most directors bury the opera under mock-baroque theatricals. Arden, having none of this, relocates it to the time of composition, anchoring it in the glamorous yet tawdry London of the 1950s. The work consequently acquires an in-your-face vividness, though there are flaws in Arden's concept.
Far from being a tempter into whose hands mankind chooses to fall, Gidon Saks's extraordinary Nick Shadow has assumed a dual function as the embodiment of a malign destiny and the incarnation of erotic danger. He controls the action from the off. Barry Banks's diminutive, appealing Tom is his will-less puppet, Mother Goose and Sellem his minions and familiars. He even presides over the madhouse where not only Tom, but also most of the rest of the cast, are finally confined as his victims.
More worrying, however, is Arden's view of the work's erotics. The libretto is by WH Auden and his lover Chester Kallman. Arden has probed it for a gay subtext, finding it in the relationship between Shadow and Tom, both of whom are portrayed as bisexual. Shadow dresses Tom as a bride before leading him to Mother Goose's bedroom. Plotting Tom's marriage to Baba the Turk (sung by Sally Burgess), the pair of them canoodle excitedly on the floor. Later, Shadow metamorphoses into a Brandoesque hunk and cruises Lisa Milne's Anne as she looks for Tom in London's smog-drenched streets. Being pure-minded, she doesn't notice him. Much of this is stunning to watch, but Arden's equation of the homoerotic with the demonic is suspect. The musical values, however, are outstanding. Saks, Banks and the rapturous Milne, all in superlative voice, give the performances of their lives. Vladimir Jurowski, conducting, superbly highlights both the rhythmic propulsion that harries Tom to his doom and the heart-rending moments of piercing lyricism.
