London critics twist and turn over Lynch Lost Highway opera

Fans of the surreal and kinky world of David Lynch will be delighted to hear that the British premiere of an operatic version of his 1997 film-noir Lost Highway has divided - and in most cases bewildered - London critics. It opened at the weekend as part of a short season by the English National Opera company at the Young Vic.

Lost Highway revolves around a jazz musician sentenced to death for murdering his wife, Renee. In jail, he appears to become another man, a garage mechanic, who escapes and has an affair with a gangster's moll, Alice, played by the same actress who played the murdered wife.

Turned into an opera by the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, there is very little singing - the text is largely spoken - and the music is, according to the Daily Telegraph's opera critic Rupert Christiansen, a "post-Stockhausenesque electronic babble". But then he didn't think much of the show at all: "Acclaimed in Europe and the US since its first performance in 2003, it arrives here looking and sounding so naively and vacuously trendy that it made me squirm." (Continued below)

The Guardian's Andrew Clements is clearly more of a Lynch fan, though not totally convinced by the avant-garde Neuwirth. He wrote: "If Lynch's compelling storytelling survives its transformation, it is debatable whether that is because of Neuwirth's score or in spite of it. But the show is worth seeing: this is contemporary European music theatre of a kind rarely staged in Britain. For that, at least, ENO's enterprise is very welcome."

Richard Morrison in the Times was struck by the performances – notably that of the New York soprano Valerie MacCarthy [pictured] as Renee/Alice, who "gamely slithers out of several skimpy frocks as both the femme fatale and her alter ego". Of Lynch's plot, he asks: "Is this a piece about parallel realities, or the inner demons that drive us mad? Plenty to ponder on your own lost highway home”.