The Rake's Progress, Royal Opera House, London

Futures: Teen angst, Jack Kerouac and the festival season

Rising from the ashes of 'Tonight is Goodbye', Futures are spearheading the up-and-coming movement o...

Too few kids are getting cultural experiences

So half of all parents believe that it isn’t their job to teach their children about history and cul...

Interview with ‘Being Human’ creator Toby Whithouse

The writer behind BBC3’s supernatural comedy-drama ‘Being Human’ speaks to Neela Debnath about serie...

When the curtain rises on The Rake's Progress at Covent Garden today, there will be no whiff of 18th-century London low-life as seen in the Hogarth engravings on which this musical morality-tale is based. This Rake traverses the American Midwest in the Fifties, with oil-derricks pumping in the background, and he progresses towards his madhouse finale via raunchy scenes in a LA cabaret, and high jinks round a swimming pool.

But with director Robert Lepage in command, such recasting is routine. One might have predicted he'd find a way to present this charmingly quirky piece as a critique of capitalism. Presiding in the pit, meanwhile, will be composer Thomas Adès, who humbly describes working with Lepage as "a real education".

An odd couple? Well, you couldn't pick a less likely team than these famously eccentric loners. But stranger still was the creative liaison which gave rise to the opera in 1951: Igor Stravinsky and his librettist W H Auden. This was the real odd couple.

Aldous Huxley suggested Auden as the librettist, and when Stravinsky wrote to ask if he was interested, he got an enthusiastic reply. Discovering that the poet couldn't easily afford the air fare to Hollywood where he lived, Stravinsky offered to pay his expenses and put him up. Auden slept with his body on a couch and his feet on a chair, and work began next morning, fortified by coffee and whisky.

Apart from putting the finale in a madhouse with Tom Rakewell playing the fiddle, Stravinsky had no ideas for the plot. Auden meanwhile without telling Stravinsky, drafted in his lover Chester Kallman as co-writer.

It was thanks to Kallman that the opera acquired its most exotic character in the shape of the unsettling bearded lady, Baba the Turk. Auden and Kallman had wanted to find a way for Rakewell to defy the laws of both God and Man, so, as an existentialist acte gratuit, they had Rakewell marry her. "We thought this a theatrical way of highlighting Tom's motiveless motives," they explained.

To 18 July (020-7304 4000)