What better venue for a brand new production of The Rake's Progress than Wilton’s Music Hall? The 19th-century stage and building have been restored enough to ensure the roof doesn’t cave in, but not so much to lose a patina of studied dereliction. The perfect setting, then, for Stravinsky’s backwards morality tale, an opera both archly-stylised and grittily down-to-earth.
The story is one in which priapic, exuberant innocence cedes to urban experience: the alienated spectacles of bearded lady and brothel, the capriciousness of the financial world, and the vacuity of libertinage. Tom is promised to Ann Trulove, though he is poor, without employment, and in want of wealth; the mysterious envoy Nick Shadow appears with good news that Tom is suddenly a rich man and must come to London. Tom enjoys the sexual and social delights of the city, before financially ruining himself and ending up in Bedlam, even if he manages to save his soul from the infernal Shadow, whose bargain – surprise surprise – was a Faustian one all along. The devil indeed makes work for idle hands, the epilogue gently chides the audience.
The design and staging were simple and graphic: ladders (of aspiration and degradation, summoning us both to heaven and to hell) were vertical punctuation; the items at the auction were represented by outsized playing cards, presaging the graveyard scene, and suggestive of this Alice in Wonderland world of excess and absurdity, in moral freefall. Costumes were 18th-century, including for the Southbank Sinfonia, who were dotted around the rear portion of the stage. They navigated Stravinsky’s fiendish score with perspicacity, despite a few tuning wobbles from the strings. The lack of a covered pit meant problems early on balancing orchestra and voice, which later settled.
In aptly music-hall fashion, Selina Cadell's production delighted in the loosened barrier between audience and performers, with cast and chorus often addressing us directly, and wandering about the auditorium in transitions between scenes. In properly Brechtian fashion, the house lights didn’t go down all the way, and we all felt suitably implicated, sat within cork-popping distance from the square mile.
For Stravinsky and his librettists, WH Auden and Chester Kallmann, 18th-century London is a synecdoche for our ambivalent experience of urban modernity, where the freedom it affords us – in seeking wealth or sexual adventure – is accompanied by moral migraine and ethical nausea. Robert Murray’s Tom massaged his temples and screwed up his eyes at key moments of personal dilemma, when the pressures of his double nature seemed particularly acute.