While Gounod's Faust plays upstairs in the company's main auditorium, the Royal Opera opens two specially commissioned works on Faustian themes in the Linbury Studio beneath – though in the case of the first, Luke Bedford's second opera, the connection feels somewhat tangential.
The common ground, though, is deception, which in David Harrower's scenario is on a demonic level of complexity. Based on a true story, Through His Teeth shows a young woman, known simply as A, taken in by R, a plausible used-car salesman, who convinces her that he is working for MI5. R's manipulation of A nearly destroys her, and as we discover during the interview sequences that intersperse the retrospective action, she is merely one of several victims.
Bedford sets Harrower's directly phrased text fluently, infusing his vocal lines with a strong sense of character and situation. The musical-dramatic pacing is swift and almost cinematic – an aspect reinforced by the use of screens with multiple CCTV images placed at the back of the stage, which show us the physical ambience of each scene. Sam Meech's videos provide this documentary-like context to Bijan Sheibani's sharply etched production, in which further screens – big metallic structures designed by Becs Andrews – alternately reveal the action and then hide it from view.
It's imaginatively done, and matches perfectly the subtle and sinister nature of Bedford's score, which deploys delicacy and refinement to draw us into its insubstantial soundworld, like something light but unsettling brushing momentarily against the listener's cheek and then moving off unrecognised. Chroma supplies the eight-piece instrumental ensemble which Sian Edwards conducts astutely. Anna Devin as the deluded A, Owen Gilhooly as the mendacious R, and Victoria Simmonds , doubling as A's interviewer and her cannier sister, comprise the excellent cast.
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