The Rake's Progress
When selling one's soul it makes sense to negotiate a good price for it, but according to cautionary tale we don't always know we're striking a bargain. In , currently at the , the young, rudderless Tom Rakewell comes into a fortune from a forgotten uncle and a year later finds himself at the gates of hell having abandoned his true love (by name and by nature - Anne Truelove) and beggared himself. He is led along this rather muddy primrose path by Nick Shadow, who encourages Tom to ever deeper debauchery and deceitfulness by insisting that peace only lies in being free from duty and desire. There is none of the sweetness or challenge of conquests in this opera, we see Tom being bedded by an aging bawd and suffering boredom and loneliness, rather than transient bliss. It's a fair point - for many, untrammelled indulgence soon palls, and the opera follows the spirit if not the letter of Hogarth's series of paintings, , from which Stravinsky took inspiration.
The singing in this production is uniformly strong, with Sally Matthews as Anne combining exquisite singing with an excellent dramatic sense. Her aria at the end of act I scene 3, voicing her fears for Tom, is particularly moving. has a rich voice and certainly looks the part, but fails to make Tom's fate compelling. This is a flaw at the centre of the production, and it is difficult to say on seeing the opera for the first time whether the fault lies with the interpretation or the work.
Widescreen projections of sweeping skies and the vision of the lovely through the night to rescue Tom (one step away from ) looked wonderful, and exuberantly American, but the transfer of the tale across the ocean wasn't altogether successful. For the first half of the opera I was able to believe that the backdrop to Tom's descent was 1950s Hollywood, but the frequent allusions to London, and the appearances of a row of policemen dressed as British bobbies in act II, burst the illusion like a great inflatable Winnebago. The connection with the collaboration of Stravinsky and WH Auden (who wrote the libretto with Chester Kallman) has been too tempting for director Robert Lepage to pass up, and he certainly has fun with it, but in the end it's not an entirely snug fit. By the time Tom has arrived at the madhouse believing himself to be Adonis to Anne's regretful Venus, I felt admiration for the work rather than the tragedy of Tom's predicament, and my final sense was of being always interested but not really gripped. The imaginative staging in seemed to distract from the story rather than bringing it alive and while this rake looks handsome and sounds ravishing, it somehow lacks a heart. It is still pleasant, however, to spend an evening in its company.
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