a dog's heart

went to a curious opera today, A Dog's Heart, based on a satirical Soviet novel and portrayed with grating music, creepy puppets and three different singers for the dog/man at the center of the show.

William and I debated it afterward, both of us handicapped by a lack of deep knowledge about soviet history in the 20s, I'm afraid, but even if we couldn't quite map all the political arguments, there was a fundamental question accessible to the least russophilic:

What's so great about being human?

I thought the production was pretty straight-forward: it would be an act of cruelty to turn an animal into a human, because what creature, however miserable and doomed, would want to know the darkness in a human soul?

But William noted the ambiguous final lines of the opera, after the dog has been transformed back into his original, happy state as a food-eating, warmth-loving creature of mean appearance - after an interlude as a crude, cruel and vicious man.

"I was lucky," he sings, "We must remember that I was lucky."

Was he lucky to be transformed back into a dog?  Or lucky to have gotten the chance to be human?


It was a Complicite production, like A Disappearing Number, which you might have heard me rave about, and therefore visually stunning.  Never before has a graphic surgical operation made me simultaneously so disgusted and so fascinated.  The entire set was comically immense, making the human characters seem like dolls in a too-large dollhouse.  The dog was skeletal in its hunger, and only slightly more solid after weeks of being fattened; with a human face and suit jacket, it became monstrous indeed.  Projections transformed the same wall into an exterior, the terrifying face of tyranny, the mental landscape of a dying animal or an emerging human, a prison or a religious choir of atheist scientists.  Absolutely engrossing.  And the swirling snowstorm at the beginning was one of those fabulous bits of stagecraft where the strings were visible - as it were - but the illusion completely convincing.

Stay warm, be kind to stray dogs, and don't think too highly of yourself just because you can call yourself human - not terrible lessons to take away -