Halfway through The Rake’s Progress, the romantic heroine – decent, virtuous Anne Trulove – travels alone to London to rescue her fiance Tom Rakewell from the city’s glittering array of bad influences. She confronts him outside his townhouse. He’s all syncopated panic, she’s got poise and dignity to burn. It’s painful to watch, but there’s worse to come: his new wife, the bearded lady Baba the Turk – married solely for what we might now call “banter” – sits unseen in a sedan chair. Increasingly irate, she starts to interrupt Tom and Anne’s reckoning. A veneer of comedy overlays the obvious tragedy. Emotional sincerity is pitted against heavily drawn irony.
It’s a scene that epitomises the knowingness of this neoclassical collaboration between Stravinsky, WH Auden and Chester Kallman. It can, despite everything, be very funny. But it wasn’t in this new production at the Grange festival. Not for want of charisma from Rosie Aldridge’s Baba, who was a force to be reckoned with – physically assured and armed with a magnificent chest voice, her comic timing precise. The opera’s black humour nonetheless relies on a feeling of easy suavity in negotiating its rhythmic complexities that wasn’t yet in evidence either on stage or in the pit, where Tom Primrose conducted the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.
Directed and designed by Antony McDonald, the staging emphatically takes a backseat to the music. Its aesthetic is stripped back and largely two-dimensional, its array of painted flats presumably a reference to the William Hogarth paintings that inspired the opera. The lighting (designed by Peter Mumford) becomes increasingly gaudy – intentional, perhaps, though I assume the fact that Anne delivered much of her final aria with her head outside the spotlight was not. Aside from a couple of song and dance routines from the chorus (energetic, if not always tonally blended) and a piece of stage business with a tennis umpire’s chair – nicely managed by John Graham-Hall as auctioneer Sellem – it’s all very static.
Instead, the voices themselves are crucial. In this young cast, Aldridge’s Baba met her match in Alexandra Oomens’ Anne: wide-eyed, yes, but also genuinely steely. As ultra-baddie Nick Shadow, Michael Mofidian was persuasive, his bass-baritone immense and sumptuous. Casting Adam Temple-Smith as the rake in such company, his tenor lucid but small, made the plot’s power dynamic painfully audible, his physical awkwardness oddly effective alongside the ease of the two female leads. Catherine Wyn-Rogers was an intimidating Mother Goose (imagine Cruella de Vil as a brothel owner) and Darren Jeffery a warm Father Trulove.
If Shadow remains the usual cartoon villain here, Baba the Turk – despite her neat goatee and harem pants – is no caricature. And, in the absence of comedy, what unfolds instead is intensely, memorably sad.
• Until 4 July at the Grange festival.
