Darker shade of gloom for Lynch
March 27, 2008
There are many films that seem to cry out for operatic treatment. Brief Encounter would make a good two-hander, or, if you wanted a grand love story with a chorus, Captain Corelli's Mandolin might do the trick. But if there is one film director whose work defies the lyric stage point blank, it must surely be David Lynch. There seems to be no purchase in his world of cold, uncanny menace and weird obsessions for the warmth of the singing voice.
But that is not how it seems to Olga Neuwirth, whose musical version of Lost Highway has its British premiere in a joint English National Opera-Young Vic production next month.
"I've always loved David Lynch's films, ever since The Elephant Man, she says, "but there was something really special about Lost Highway."
"Special" is one way to describe it - obscure and confusing might be another. Even Lynch's greatest fans have some trouble understanding its labyrinthine complexities. The film's first half is set in the strangely claustrophobic confines of an apartment, home to a jazz musician, Fred Madison, and his wife, Renee. Their passionless life is invaded by a sinister presence that delivers, unseen, intimate videos of their life to their front door.
One of these shows the increasingly jealous Fred murdering Renee. But did he do it or did he fantasise about doing it? And, when Fred mysteriously vanishes from the prison cell on death row, is the young garage-hand Pete who appears in his place a genuine double, or merely Fred's fantasy of the young virile man he would like to be?
These ambiguities are precisely what fascinated Neuwirth. If any composer could possibly create a music-theatre version of Lynch's world, it would be this tiny, delicate but frighteningly intense composer.
Neuwirth is one of a new generation of talented Austrian composers who seem determined to bury the idea of Viennese music as nostalgic and ironic. Her pieces are not musical statements in the normal sense. They are more like vast, bottomless soundscapes that summon up the unease and disorientation of modern life with uncomfortable vividness.
So it is not surprising that Lynch's film seemed a gift. "I love the way it plays with time," she says, "and the way you cannot tell what is reality and what is fantasy. This fits in with my view of music-theatre, because I don't want to represent things in a naturalistic way. I wanted to create an endless loop of time, with little phrases that recur again and again."
What did Lynch himself think of her idea? "Oh, he was so supportive to me, and he's so open to all kinds of music."
What Neuwirth came up with is a vast soundscape in which the sound of 26 players and 11 singers and singing actors is mingled with video images and a synthesised soundtrack. Snatches of Kurt Weill and Monteverdi add a further strangeness to the mix.
"I wanted to blur the boundaries, so that you don't know which sounds are real and which are coming from the speakers all round the auditorium," Neuwirth says. "It creates the effect of immersion in a kind of aural phantasmagoria."
Diane Paulus, the New York-based director of this production, admits the task of finding a theatrical analogue for Lynch's quintessentially cinematic vision has been a challenge. "I knew I had to do something different," she says, "and I knew we couldn't re-create all these different locations. So what I've created with [the video designer] Philip Bussmann is an installation, something that can transform into many different spaces by stimulating the audience's own powers of visualisation. That's the whole beauty of theatre: you have this live situation where the audience completes the work."
The design is impressive. Running at floor level right through the audience at the Young Vic will be the "lost highway" down which Fred ends up fleeing from the police. Above its central point will be a floating perspex box accessible by a retractable spiral staircase, surrounded on all four sides by video screens.
"These screens might show an action in close-up," Bussmann says, "or they can be Pete's garage, or the apartment. So, in effect, the audience can make their own cut or edit by going from the screen to the live action."
The result will certainly be powerfully discomforting and disorienting. But why should we want to submit to something that is apparently so negative?
For Neuwirth, the bleakness of the work is a testament to its truth. "It's about the tragic way our individual personalities can be destroyed by our own past. When Fred is on death row he wants to forget, and for a moment he thinks he has escaped. But in the end his obsessions drown out reality. I think this is becoming a bigger and bigger danger for us as our lives become more complicated."
Paulus takes a more hopeful view. "I don't feel that the energy of the piece is negative. In fact, it feels very compassionate. We can connect with Fred, because his plight could happen to any of us. And isn't that why we come to the theatre, to experience some kind of catharsis or illumination?"
Telegraph, London
