Faust – review

"We were very clear about it being contemporary from the beginning," Rob Kearley remarks in the programme for Opera North's new production of Faust, which he has co-directed with Ran Arthur Braun in association with video artist Lillevan. "Contemporary" really does mean here and now in this instance: as presidential elections draw near, Braun and Kearley have relocated Gounod's opera to the present-day US and "put it into a political environment where everything is heightened, forced, false and manufactured".

It actually starts out as a commentary on technology and greed. When Peter Auty's fiftysomething Faust sells his soul in exchange for youth to James Creswell's sinister Méphistophélès, plastic surgeons arrive to fix his looks before he is whisked from his file-lined study into a world in which everyone seems attached to a smart phone or tablet. Méphistophélès' acid remarks about the dominance of "the golden calf" are soon proved true when money begins to rain down from the skies and Lillevan's screens are filled with whirling roulette wheels, Vegas-style.

Things get worrying, however, when we reach Faust's relationship with Marguerite (Juanita Lascarro). Gounod presents her as a naive young girl, driven to insanity and the murder of her illegitimate child when her seduction brings down on her the wrath both of her soldier brother Valentin and of the judgmental society in which she moves. Braun and Kearley, however, reinvent Valentin (Marcin Bronikowski) as an evangelical politician with an anti-abortion agenda, whose followers hound Marguerite when she aborts Faust's baby.

This creates immense problems. First of all, the reimagination of any narrative of infanticide in terms of abortion is profoundly questionable. And second, in an attempt to accomplish it in musico-dramatic terms, a fair amount of violence has been done to the score, with extensive cutting and dovetailing of episodes in the fourth and fifth acts.

There are some fine performances, though Lascarro's voice has lost some of its lustre since I last heard her, and Bronikowski struggles with some of his high notes. Creswell is chilling, while Auty sings the title role with infinite passion. Stuart Stratford's conducting is stylish and unsentimental. But it remains a disquieting effort: Opera North may well have a controversy on their hands, though it's not an artistic success.

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