Lost Highway - found at Young Vic

I suppose it must have seemed like a terribly daring idea at the time. Imagine if we took a dark, baffling, impenetrable movie, by the elder statesman of the dark/baffling/impenetrable oeuvre and made it into, *Gasp* an Opera! We'll get a DBI style composer and an even more DBI writer to knock up the libretto. We do some right moody visuals and presto, box office gold.

Sadly, what we actually got was a meandering, Philip Glass lite score, lack lustre visuals and some awkward melismatics from our cast of Actors(tm). The Mr.Eddy/Dick Durant character had the most fun with it, warbling and screeching like Tony Soprano on PCP. Our femme fatale also had a fine set of lungs on her, which she showed off with admirable regularity, both vocally and visually (God bless her). The Fred/Pete characters were deeply underwhelming however, and the rest of the hangers-on looked like the sort of saddo drama wannabes that hang outside the Old Vic stage door waiting for Spacey to sign their arses.

I think what irritated Skrzkrk and myself most was the unspoken assumption that the very act of making an opera out of Lost Highway was radical enough in itself to not warrant any further challenging of the material. No need to bother doing a score that actually disturbed and disquieted the audience in the way that Trent Reznor's original soundtrack for the film did. Lynch's films all have fantastic soundtracks and he's never afraid to mix genres and blend classical, jazz, electronica and heavy metal influences into one twisted soundscape. This show was seriously in need of some Burial or perhaps Sunn O))). The same goes for the lighting and general staging. Surely in a high tech space like the Young Vic's newly revamped auditorium, some of the film's intensely claustrophobic lighting could have not just been recreated but taken to new extremes. Let's pin Fred to the floor with a burning spot or crowd him into a pitch black strobed up corner. There was just too much conventional theatre business going on.

While we were perfectly well entertained I couldn't help thinking Mr.Lynch would have been bored stiff.

B