Word: auden
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...play, conceived of and written largely by Auden, is a series of seemingly peripheral scenes and songs in the modern disjunctive genre, tenuously held together by the quest of Alan Norman (played by Mark Driscoll) and his dog for the missing Sir Francis Crewe (Paul Warner). The general of Pressan Ambo, the rural English town where the quest begins, explains the dog's disloyalty to all as if he were speaking of the play itself: "It's his mongrel blood, of course No loyalty, no proper feeling...
Claiming ownership on one side are play wrights W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. They have left the other claimant, director Bill Rauch, with a verse play which popularizes Marxism in a social and political critique of pre-World War Two bourgeois Europe...
...given so little personal material of any depth or complexity in the text, that stellar acting is the only solution. With impressive consistency, the humorous touches thrown into this updated version keep the 1935 play entertaining. Brian McCue's series of comic scenes seem to emerge directly from Auden's own witty and slightly bizarre sense of humor. And Max Cantor shines as the ridiculous subjectivist poet who tells Alan Norman that all objects exist only in the poet's mind: "If I shut my eyes they all disappear." The poet's theory is broken when the dog bites...
Russell's great inspiration is to solve the paradox at the opera's core, that of a modern work in courtly guise. If the music will not carry the dramatic load, then the action must. The director updates the splendid, rather literary W.H. Auden-Chester Kallmann libretto from 18th century to contemporary England without altering a word of text. Realized by Designer Derek Jarman, the images are vivid and immediate, painted in hard, splashy colors to evoke a drug-and crime-ridden world...
...Under D, Auden describes a dream in which his appendix is to be removed. Instead, the doctor cuts off "the arm of an old lady who was going to do me an injury." Mommy dearest? Of course, and Edel does not fail to evoke the emasculating female. How much weight Auden, a homosexual, gave to primal imagery is open to question. An artist must care more about what he makes than what he is. Auden put it right when he told a friend, "I am a poet first and a queen second...