If you’ve seen David Lynch’s film Lost Highway, you might be familiar with one key scene. A charming but psychopathic gangster called Mr Eddy has just brutally kicked a man within an inch of his life for committing an antisocial act. A car mechanic called Pete looks on with some horror.

“Sorry about that, Pete,” says the gangster, “but I just can’t stand it when somebody doesn’t obey the rules. That’s one thing I cannot tolerate.” “I can see that,” says the mechanic.

Now imagine those lines being rendered as part of an opera. The gangster is rapping in a rhythmic, jagged, Brech-tian speech-song, leaping from low growls to high-pitched squeaks, while the mechanic responds with a sweet, bel-canto whimper. “You like pornos?” growls the gangster, suddenly changing the subject. “Give you a boner?” “No thank you, sir,” sighs the mechanic, in his prettiest operatic voice.

It’s both terrifying and hilarious, like watching Lynch’s already disorientating film noir being played through a wobbly circus mirror.

Welcome to the rehearsal studios of English National Opera, where a large cast and crew are working on an operatic version of Lost Highway. Written by the acclaimed Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, it was given its premiere in 2003 in her home town of Graz and brought to New York by a student company last year. This version, part of the ENO’s season of experimental works at the Young Vic, is the opera’s first fully-staged production, in which the cast will perform on a floating Perspex cube, set above a desert highway, surrounded by four huge video screens and an audience in the round.

“This is about as close as you can get to making a real live film on stage,” says Valérie MacCarthy, the American soprano who plays the dual role of Renee and Alice, performed in the film by Patricia Arquette. “You’re surrounded by video screens, you’re constantly underscored by music, and you’re miked up throughout the action, which means that you’re often whispering. You’re not even doing a standard opera voice – you’re not using any vibrato and instead using tons of breathiness. There’s no intermission – it’s two hours all the way through. And there are even whole scenes which take place in moving cars. All you need is someone shouting out ‘action’ and ‘cut’ and it would feel exactly like a film!”

Even by Lynch’s surreal standards, his 1997 movie Lost Highwayis a particularly strange piece of film noir. The plot concerns Fred Madison, a jazz musician whose wife, Renee, is found brutally murdered. Fred is arrested for homicide and sentenced to death, until wardens on death row realise that Fred has disappeared from his cell and been mysteriously replaced by a man called Pete Dayton, a garage mechanic half Fred’s age. On his release from jail, Pete goes on to have an affair with a gangster’s moll called Alice, who looks exactly like Renee, and a complex chain of events links him back to Madison.

“Usually when you make an adaptation, your first instinct is to ignore the original,” says Diane Paulus, the production’s director. “But, during the initial production meetings, we all found ourselves watching it over and over again and discussing it, if only to work out what the hell the film was about. The ambiguity made it ideal for interpretation.”

Where the film industry is usually suspicious of musical adaptations (Har-rison Birtwistle, for instance, was thwarted in his attempts to make an opera based on Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris), Lynch has been supportive. “Luckily he comes from an avant-garde background,” the ENO producer Patrick Dickie says, “so he knew that operas don’t make much money and didn’t make many demands.” Lynch even allowed the librettist (the Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek) to use his screenplay.

Much of this production attempts to dramatise the mental illness that inspired Lynch’s film. “Lynch discussed with Olga the idea that one or more of the characters in the film are undergoing a ‘psychogenic fugue’,” Paulus explains. “Now this is actually a recognised medical state and we started reading up on it in medical journals. It’s about unexpectedly taking physical leave of your surroundings and setting off on a journey of some kind. It’s usually associated with a trauma or breakdown. And the medical journal goes on to say: ‘These journeys can last hours or even several days or months, and can involve travelling thousands of miles.’

“We started to see the story as a series of alternative realities, where time stands still and branches out in several different directions. And music theatre is an ideal way to explore this. The moment when a singer performs an aria or a showtune is often a way of stopping time and examining a certain moment. Here Olga uses every melody like a microscope to examine these ideas while time stands still. ”

One performer who’s been involved in the project since its premiere is the singer, actor and musician David Moss, for whom Neuwirth wrote the part of the gangster Mr Eddy. “She’s brilliant at undercutting her work with references to popular culture and high culture,” he says. “In Lost Highway you can hear allusions to Lou Reed’s Magic Moment and Nat King Cole’s Unforgettable; you can hear Kurt Weill, Monteverdi, Cole Porter and Schoenberg, along with all this strange Hollywoodian movie music.

“It’s like how Lynch uses a pop cultural reference to make you laugh, and then suddenly hits you on the back of the head with something gruesome. Olga’s music does exactly the same thing.”

So who’s going to come to this? Lynch heads? Modern-opera buffs? Art-house theatre fans? “All of the above and more, I hope,” Paulus laughs. “I can see why some people might have a problem with contemporary opera – I know I do – but I really don’t have that problem with Olga’s work. Some of it is atonal but it’s also witty, and scary, and accessible. Whatever it is, it certainly won’t be boring!”

— Lost Highway opens next April 4 at the Young Vic, SE1 (020-7922 2922)

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