‘An opera of dazzling surfaces, knowing theatrical tropes and deliberate distancing effects,” is how director Polly Graham describes The Rake’s Progress, in a programme note for her new staging for English Touring Opera. Completed in 1951, Stravinsky’s ironic Hogarthian parable ranges allusively through operatic history in its exploration of the relationship between indolent Tom Rakewell and demonic Nick Shadow, deploying the formalities of 18th-century opera – recitative, aria and ensemble – to distance us from the protagonists even as the music itself exposes their thoughts and feelings with extraordinary poignancy. But where Stravinsky strives for narrative clarity, Graham on occasion tips stylisation towards surrealism, with uneven results.
April Dalton’s designs elide Rococo frippery with the distortion of Dalí, as pictures of eyes and lips materialise on the walls of Mother Goose’s brothel, and bizarre bric-a-brac fills the house where Baba (Lauren Young) lives with Tom (Frederick Jones, unwell on opening night; his understudy, Brenton Spiteri, sang the last two acts from the side of the stage). Some of it is unduly busy. The opening scene between Tom and Anne (Nazan Fikret) now takes place at a May Day festival, during which Tom is already being eyed by Shadow (Jerome Knox), while masked pagan figures, half-human, half animal, dance round a maypole. There’s more maypole later on in the graveyard scene, which proves distracting.
