The Rake’s Progress/Scottish Opera,Theatre Royal, Glasgow, review

The Rake’s Progress can seem a rather chilly, exclusive affair. You could be forgiven for thinking that Stravinsky and his librettists Auden and Kallman had whimsically devised it for a salon élite privy to the brilliantly clever allusiveness of their neoclassical pastiche – and this, I suppose, is the line that the classic John Cox/David Hockney staging at Glyndebourne follows.

But what I liked most about David McVicar’s approach in Scottish Opera’s new production is that it doesn’t altogether collude with the smart-ass game-playing: although John Macfarlane’s dark-hued designs frame the drama inside the backdrops and wings of a Georgian theatre (with a gruesome Memento Mori as a front cloth), McVicar looks beyond the artifice and excavates some common humanity and emotional realism from the parable. The characters aren’t two-dimensional cut-outs: they have flesh and blood, and their pain really hurts.

Pace is another of the production’s virtues: one short interval and swift scene changes (not a quality that Hockney’s sets allow) compensate for the score’s occasional longueurs and give it a crisp edge, which the light touch of Sian Edwards’ spry conducting and the orchestra’s airy playing did much to sharpen.

Owing to illness, I missed the show’s premiere: at the performance I managed to catch – its fourth – everything seemed smoothly played in, despite the absence through illness of Carolyn Sampson, whose place as Anne Trulove was bravely taken by Elin Pritchard, a postgraduate student at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire.

Sweet-toned and poised if understandably a tad cautious in her big aria, she did an admirable job, presenting the character without simpering affectation or special pleading. Her Tom Rakewell was the personable Lithuanian tenor Edgaras Montvidas: his guttural timbre and accented English may not be ideal, but he projected clearly and shaped “Love, too frequently betrayed” with lovely sensitivity.

In keeping with the production’s warm tone, Steven Page played Nick Shadow without eye-rolling ham and Leah-Marian Jones made someone more engaging of Baba the Turk than the usual camp Broadway diva. Both needed more vocal weight. The chorus sang and enacted the scenes of riot and debauchery with relish, as did Colin Judson his stint on the Auctioneer’s podium.

The programme reminds us that The Rake’s Progress hasn’t been heard north of the border for forty years: its return is welcome, and Scottish Opera has done it proud.

Until 31 March (at Festival Theatre, Edinburgh) Box office 0131 529 6000