Lost Highway

Published Monday 7 April 2008 at 14:25 by George Hall

Premiered in Austria in 2003, Olga Neuwirth’s music theatre piece based on the cult David Lynch movie has its first British production as the opener for ENO’s Young Vic season.

The space works well for its relatively small-scale apparatus, with a cast of around a dozen split between singers and actors, and an accompanying chamber ensemble, here under the baton of Baldur Bronnimann. The score also uses a good deal of live electronics. There are some stick-out quotations and a broad impact of modernist devices alongside other passages closer to ambient music. It’s a mish-mash and, worse, a forgettable one. Far too much of it is little more than background.

What it adds to Lynch’s concept is debatable. The film’s deliberate ambiguities and shifts of identity are repeated in a libretto that cuts down the screenplay while being largely faithful to it. That the result is hard to follow may be the point, but a clearer directional frame would have helped. In Riccardo Hernandez’s designs, much of Diane Paulus’ staging takes place in a perspex box above the audience’s heads. Appropriate images of sex and violence are seen on surrounding video screens. Other scenes are located on a central highway that separates one half of the audience from the other.

Acting performances are decent rather than special, with a lot of cliched playing out of the stereotypes of film noir. It seems a long 90 minutes.