A Dog's Heart

Hmmm. where to start when trying to describe the Complicite/ENO collaborative adaptation of Bulgakov's story, A Dog's Heart? Frankenstein meets War Horse meets Quentin Crisp's Gothic fantasy Chog? possibly. Frankenstein because it's a Gothic fable that sees the scientific creation of a monster symbolising the proletariat (more or less), War Horse because the eponymous dog is a puppet manually operated by 3-4 puppetmasters, and Chog because it's a seriously disturbing tale involving a weird dog/man hybrid. 

In short, it's a deliciously dark Soviet political polemic that sees a stray dog fall prey to the scientific experimentation of a bourgeois intellectual doctor who swaps the dog's testicles and pituitary gland for those of a recently deceased man. the experiment is the 'natural' continuation of the doctor's commercial practice involving human/animal transplants  - whereby he gives men dogs' genitals to make them virile, and women monkeys' uteri to repair the ravages of sexual promiscuity. After this latest transplant, however, the dog actually physically transforms into a man - and proves himself to be the worst combination of man and beast. But he is readily embraced by the soviet authorities, who award him a government post, despite his sexually rapacious tendencies, scatological nature, and permanent state of inebriation. havoc ensues. After he denounces the doctor to the authorities (amongst other things) the doctor forcibly restrains him and reverses the procedure - but the damage is done.

All that and it's an opera. But not any old opera, no, no; one whose foundations are dissonant chords, cacophonous clashes, and dog howling sopranos. no joke. set to the jarring, jagged score is contemporary dialogue - abrasive, course, witty - at times hilarious, even - poignant and curious.

It is, quite simply, brilliant. Shocking, arresting and thought-provoking obviously, but also so cleverly realised - from the delicate precision of the puppetry and the ingenious deployment of numerous projections which blast out messages in soviet font, to the use of silhouette, and gory, gory on-stage antics (blood, there's rivers of it). It's also funny, very funny (with a libretto which includes 'fuck you, motherfucker' you'd be hard pressed to remain po-faced).

After the MASSIVE disappointment that saw ENO collaborate with promenade theatre kings Punchdrunk, on The Duchess of Malfi, in a vast disused warehouse space somewhere at the end of the Dockland's Light Railway during the summer (completely non-sensical and a bizarre re-apportioning of dramatic focus to completely irrelevant themes) i was apprehensive, but this production brought all the experimentation, courage, chutzpah and energy of Complicite to opera without sacrificing its integrity. AMAZING.