The Rake’s Progress

JOE BATES laughed out loud at CUOS’s one dimensional Rake’s Progress, but worries it may have missed the point.

ADC christopher dollins Christopher Stark claudia parkes CUOS gwilym bowen joanna songi Opera rake's progress West Road Concert Hall

Igor Stravinsky and WH Auden’s The Rake’s Progress

CUOS production, directed by Claudia Parkes

12th February, 8pm, West Road Concert Hall.

[rating:3.5/5]

The Rake’s Progress is a  subtle mixture of irony and sincerity. Bathos and pathos battle for dominance in a cardboard cut-out version of eighteenth-century London. The CUOS team did capture this idea, yet went too far, ending up with a production as one dimensional as its cardboard set.

Yet one dimension was often appropriate. Christopher Dollins was consistently excellent as a knowing, mocking Nick Shadow, the mephistophelean character who precipitates the ‘progress’ of Tom Rakewell from gentleman to rake. Dollins skillfully maintained a nudge-nudge-wink-wink relationship with the audience, and this ironic distant from the action gave his character an appealing, sinister detachment.

Joanna Songi’s Anne Trulove also operated on a single emotional plane. Songi’s stunningly unaffected voice and wide-eyed acting brought out all the purity and innocence of Auden’s character. Her extensive solo mourning Tom’s absence was extraordinary in its control, clarity and sentimental power. Yet Anne should have steel too, and this aspect was somewhat overlooked. Songi was just a drop too drippy.

Gwilym Bowen’s Tom Rakewell, however, was a perfect drip. Bowen’s characterisation focused on the bewildered. His Tom seemed incapable of dealing with the debauched situations in which he found himself. In the excellently raunchy brothel scene, Bowen stood bewildered as bikinied bodies encircled him. The wide eyes and earnest hand gestures became increasingly ridiculous with his descent into sybaritic mania.

Bowen’s voice was perfectly suited to this role. Its reedy, slightly thin sound was not always perfectly projected and his chest infection caused occasional losses of control. Yet somehow these negatives seemed to work in his favour –his unusually delicate voice was well suited to convey Tom’s irresolution. Even the bad chest worked in his favour at some points; during an emotional solo, his cracking voice brought an apt sense of vulnerability.

This was characteristic of a production that continually turned potential negatives to its advantage. The parodic nature of Auden’s libretto and Stravinsky’s music permitted a crudeness that might have been undesirable in another context. The strained voice of Baba the Turk was an apposite expression of her tedious hectoring; the wooden acting of Mr. Trulove, a parody of the stiff upper lip of a Georgian gentleman.

Dollins’s Shadow and Bowen’s Rakewell, with their juvenile credulity and winking menace, drew genuine laughs. Auden’s hilarious libretto (‘What is it about a Turkish lady with a beard that’s so seductive?’) was some guarantee of comedy, but the delivery of the cast was commendable.

Yet this constant satire eventually became tiresome. The truly emotional moments were rendered more ridiculous than sublime by the context. Tom’s death generated no emotional response, surrounded as he was by a primary school imagining of Bedlam.

Any seriousness was further undermined by the amateurish production. The cardboard set, presumably a comment on the vacuousness of the play’s setting, simply looked unfinished. Lighting was chaotic, lines of white tape had been left down the centre of the stage and the curtains were drawn too early in every scene, prompting applauds that drowned out the orchestra’s final notes.

Mockney: Parkes’s set was a poor rip-off of Hockey’s beautiful, Hogarth-inspired etchings.

This lack of professionalism was unfair given the proficiency of the music making. The singing was generally excellent. Though the ensembles were sometimes unclear, the chorus scenes were extremely dynamic, with excellent diction and flawless tuning. The orchestra, under the direction of Christopher Stark, bubbled along nicely, though the strings, in particular, lacked the precision of attack and intonation that is necessary for Stravinsky’s crisp writing.

Claudia Parkes’s production was genial: full of laughter and pleasingly naïve emotion. Yet in emphasising the bathetic over the pathetic, she ultmately failed to fully understand the complexities of Auden and Stravinsky’s creation.