Olga Neuwirth,  Lost Highway: A music-theatre piece by Olga Neuwirth based on the film by David Lynch and Barry Gifford. ENO at the Young Vic, London 4.4.2008 (AO)

Libretto: Elfriede Jelinek and Olga Neuwirth
Director : Diane Paulus

Cast:
Renee/Alice : Valerie McCarthy
Fred Madison : Mark Bonner
Mystery Man : Christopher Robson
Detectives : Andrew Playfoot, Alisdair Simpson
Andy : Raphael Sacks, David Sheppard
Pete Dayton Quirijn de Lang
Mr Eddy/Dick Laurent : David Moss
Other roles : Andrew Bone, Andrew Morton, Spencer Cummins, Craig Heyworth, Rae Baker, Jeshua Dreyfus.

Members of the Orchestra at English National Opera, Baldur Brönnimann, conductor

David Lynch’s film is only a starting point for Olga Neuwirth’s Lost Highway and even a Lynch film is one dimensional, in the sense that it appears on a screen, and you can switch off or walk away. Neuwirth’s work is far more unsettling because the audience is drawn into the events on many levels. The stage runs down the middle of the hall so you see across to other members of the audience, “behind” the action. Mechanics like rafters and pulleys are visible above you, your eye drawn towards them by screen projections and off stage singing. You can’t remain passive and detached in a work like this. I’m not even sure whether, in a conventional sense, I liked it or not but the ideas it provokes are still percolating in my mind.  So, no easy reactions from me.  Lost Highway is unsettling, but it’s well thought through: it provokes a lot of ideas which continue to operate long after the show ends.

Lost Highway follows the bizarre logic of dreams. When we are asleep, the defences of consciousness shut down, allowing the subconscious to run free.  “Stop Making Sense !”, said David Byrne, the all round art philosopher. He meant, I think, that too much filtering suppresses creativity.  The young couple find a video made of them while they were sleeping. Their privacy has been invaded, but why ? When they confront the Mystery Man who films them, he simply says “You invited me in”. “You switched off the burglar alarms” cry the detectives, but it’s too late for them to stop Fred Madison, the first protagonist, from descending further into his nightmare.  Lynch’s characters may reference film noir stereotypes, but these are just shorthand.  The real drama here is psychological and in this arena, Freud's Id can run riot.

If the symbols are sinister and quite unsavoury for the audience, what must they be like for performers? Ironically, I imagine that Lost Highway must be hugely cathartic.  It must be like participating in a psychodrama workshop, confronting one’s inner demons and preconceptions.  Imagine what it must be like to put yourself into The Mystery Man ? He’s sinister, like a bloated corpse, yet is he evil ? Christopher Robson acts out the menace in the part, but his singing is by turns sensually luscious and terrifying. The countertenor voice ranges high above normal conversation, so defies convention. It’s wonderful for expressing complex things and mystery.  No wonder it  inspires so many modern composers. Similarly, what must it be like to create Mr Eddy, the mafia boss with a malevolent authoritarian persona?  Neuwirth builds strain into the lines, so  when threatened, Mr Eddy’s voice seems to shatter. His bullying is shallow bluff, that’s why he needs his bodyguards to shore him up.  David Moss, calls himself “an extreme vocalist” because he has a range of 4½ octaves, but more significantly, he has unusual emotional range, for he also composes, acts and stretches the boundaries of theatre. Perhaps Moss will create for our generation a new version of the almost unperformable Henze Versuch über Schweine. Mr Eddy isn’t quite as demanding, but Moss negotiates the demented Sprechgesang-like inflections in the vocal line, where high pitched shrieks suddenly burst out of relative normality.  I hate to think how Neuwirth and Moss would have created the bully in Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

It is interesting to see how Neuwirth, Jelinek and Paulus define Renee/Alice, the only female singing part. Valerie MacCarthy sings both parts who seem, on the surface, to be different characters.  In fact they both not really women at all, but templates onto which Lynch projected his male fantasies of femmes fatales, a sort of post modern Lulu.  MacCarthy has to strip off literally as well as figuratively.  Like the Mystery Man and Mr Eddy, her roles exist in layers, but unlike them, their surfaces don’t crack in the music.  Parallel to the actor Andy (Raphael Sacks), there’s another Andy, David Sheppard, who sings invisibly off stage. Neuwith uses one person for two roles and two people for one, but this is very important to the shape shifting duality of the work. At one point, there’s a countertenor trio in which Robson, Moss and Sheppard are positioned high up in the ceiling. Their eerie chorus is surprisingly moving as it rings out high and clear in indeterminate space.

Neuwirth’s Lost Highway is more sophisticated than the film original because of the quality of the music.  It was inventive and tantalising.  Quotes from jazz and pop amplifiy details, but Neuwirth has too much integrity to wallow in pastiche. This is distinctive music where sounds twist and smear, and make uncanny changes of direction.  Although the instrumentation is spartan, there are in fact two orchestras, one live, one recorded, and a secondary conductor (Stephen Higgins)  so the concept of duality runs through the music as powerfully as through the acting. The orchestra is also clearly visible, its presence shadowing what happens on stage.  This is more than background or commentary.  The orchestra operates like a larger Mystery Man, insinuating its way past the barriers that separate music and acting, breaking down the “defence mechanisms” between them.  Every now and then, a soloist will break cover and interject over the singers and actors.  This also reflects the vocal lines with their sudden peaks and descents.

Everyone who goes to Lost Highway will get something different from it, and some will discover more than others.  Lynch’s images pertain to a specific social situation, while the existential anomie  that Neuwirth fathoms could exist in any time or place.  The danger is that audiences might connect too strongly to the outward symbols rather than seeing further.  For example, the car which “drives” across the desert in the end, or seems to. This is classic B movie schlock, but in Neuwirth, it connects with the recurring sense of being trapped. Fred seems to get out of his Perspex prison, but where does he go ?  Alice and Andy think they can just drive away from their problems, but their car has no engine.  And of course, it’s disturbing.  Some people respond well to this; one man in the audience told me, “It’s like facing your insecurities”. That’s profoundly intuitive, and good for him but many people can’t cope with such things. Still, there is so much in Lost Highway that it is worth making the effort of engaging with its mysteries.

Best of all though, it’s good to see ENO finding its audacious, innovative soul again.  Like or dislike Lost Highway, it is a challenging piece which can stimulate and provoke thought in deeper sense than, say, a West End type musical. There’s so much talk these days about what could be done to expand opera audiences.  Lost Highway may seem scary but it is actually very good work indeed because it’s so well thought through.  Beyond the trendy “movies” image this is serious work indeed and there are always  audiences who respond to good quality, whatever form it may take. Dumbing-down attracts dumb audiences, and this audience was anything but that. In fact, part of the pleasure was talking to people after the performance.  They were fired up, eagerly discussing the work on a deeply intuitive level.  Whatever the sales for Lost Highway may be, it does show that there is an audience for intelligent, work, if it’s well marketed.  So the higher that ENO aims, it’s quite possible audiences will follow.  On my way to the Young Vic, I took a taxi. The driver asked what was on, so I told him. “Wow, I got to go !” he said.

Anne Ozorio


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