Lost Highway

Rehearsal Pictures from Lost Highway, c Sarah Lee/ ENO

The English National Opera take on David Lynch’s cult thriller Lost Highway in a performance of miracles.

“I like to remember things my own way. How I remember them”

If you’re going to try to sum up David Lynch’s films with a single line, then that one, from Lost Highway, pretty much does it. Conventional narrative and realistic acting have never really had a place in Lynch’s dreamworld, where surfaces only serve to conceal the truth. Civilisation is a thin façade and animal violence and sex could break through at any moment.

The plot of Lost Highway is simple enough but what it means is another matter. After hearing that “Dick Laurent is dead”, Fred and Renée find that an intruder has filmed them during their sleep. Renée is murdered but Fred remembers nothing. He’s arrested and condemned to the chair, but while in his prison cell he transforms into another person - Pete. Released, Pete gets involved with psychotic porn-gangster Mr Eddy’s girlfriend, Alice - a blond version of Renée (keeping up?), leading to sex on a motorbike, robbery, more murders and, in a loop back to the start, a discovery of what it means that “Dick Laurent is dead”. In between times we meet the Mystery Man who has the power to be in two places at the same time.

So far, so Lynchian, with the director’s habitual forays into weirdness, archetypical characters, pop culture, scarily random violence and bathetic comedy.

But then the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth comes along and decides to make it into a piece of music theatre. Unsurprisingly, it’s not your usual night at the opera, and ENO has moved to The Young Vic for the UK premiere.

Director Diana Paulus puts you both inside and outside the story. It’s staged in the round, so you look in on a two-level set: a corridor bisecting the audience and a perspex box surrounded by four video screens suspended above you. Meanwhile the sound is sent through speakers all around the hall, forcing you into the centre of the maelstrom.

Inside this torus, you’re bounced around by a level of intensity you’ll seldom experience in the theatre. Like the original story, the music lurches from the highest expressionism to echoes of everything from Monteverdi to Kurt Weill, by way of chunks of pure Nat King Cole and Lou Reed.
There might be fewer than 30 people in the band but with everyone, including the cast, amplified, plus tape and electronic effects there’s no lack of power and the sudden shifts of mood and sonic explosions create a sense that anything could happen – and probably will.

Between fast-moving action (12 scenes in 90 minutes), shifting personas, complex – though always engaging - music and multi-level staging, there’s a sense of overload and edginess (as there should be) and everyone performs miracles. But if there’s something beyond a miracle, David Moss – Neuwirth’s preferred Mr Eddy  – manages it, covering everything from crooning falsetto to straight-out shouting, sometimes in the space of a single line. If you can’t get to the Young Vic, you can catch his performance on Kairos’ commercial recording.

John Riley

Lost Highway, The Young Vic, 66 The Cut, Waterloo, London, SE1 8LZ  six performances from 4 to 11 April. Book tickets here

Lost Highway (CD) Kairos  0012542KAI.
Soundclip at www.kairos-music.com

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