The Times

Debra Craine 

Live hard and die young. That should be the tagline of Will Tuckett’s excellent new Pleasure’s Progress. His hybrid production promises “a tale of sex! wigs! wags! ‘n’ bawds!” and though it is indeed as bawdy — and bitingly funny — as the teaser suggests, its portraits of 18th-century London are profoundly tragic, too.

The streets of Covent Garden are crowded, filthy and vice-ridden, peopled by the poor and the sick. Drunkenness and venereal disease are rife as gin and prostitution offer the only means of escape. Even the rich have their problems — adulterous marriages, mounting debt. This is the depraved world of Hogarth’s satirical etchings. Innocence doesn’t stand a chance.

We begin in Bedlam where Tom Solomon, as Hogarth himself, introduces the madmen and madwomen (or so society judges them) who have fallen on hard times. Nancy is a nymphomaniac, Tom Rakewell is consumed by debt, Pamela suffers from over-religiosity and Lizzie’s head is somewhere out there in the night sky. They and their fellow cast members then act out the stories in Hogarth’s etchings, including A Rake’s Progress, Marriage à la mode and — most poignantly — A Harlot’s Progress. Who is who is a little confusing at times, but the narrative is rich and well paced.

Tuckett’s initial premise was to create a piece reflecting the art forms of the Royal Opera House, but to do so in such a way as to be able to perform it in a variety of settings, both indoor and outdoor. So song, speech, live music and dance (even puppets) are used to evoke Hogarth’s ribald characters, brought to life on a simple and flexible set. Alasdair Middleton’s libretto is outrageously saucy (“hung like a hummingbird”) and darkly observant; Paul Englishby’s clever music is bright, buoyant and filled with an underlying sadness.

The Independent

Jenny Gilbert

Hogarth's Rake and his progress – to debt and destitution in 18th-century London – have provided the inspiration for both opera and ballet, notably in works by Stravinsky and Ninette de Valois.

But in Will Tuckett's Pleasure's Progress, the character Tom Rakewell is shoved aside by his fellow inmates in Bedlam, the infamous London asylum. They all want to relate their personal histories of misery and woe, leaving the frustrated Rake just 60 seconds near the end in which to speed-talk us through his own, in the manically abbreviated style of the three-minute Hamlet.

Tuckett can be relied on to tell a story in style, his previous work having included a Wind in the Willows that became a repeat Christmas hit, and a memorable dance-theatre version of Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale. Originally a choreographer, Tuckett's special talent is to meld elements of music theatre, movement and design into a seamless hybrid. Pleasure's Progress – produced by the Royal Opera House's ROH2 – could be billed either as opera or physical satire without telling a lie. The thread that binds them is comedy, of that scarcer-than-scarce variety that produces real belly laughs and an aching jaw.

The marvel is that such fun can be had from such grisly material. Tuckett and his librettist, Alasdair Middleton, have done their research. Not only do they draw on several series of Hogarth's etchings, but also on contemporary records of London's teeming, filthy streets, and its epic levels of alcoholism, venereal disease and infanticide. In summoning humour from the direst human tragedy, they are only being true to the satirical spirit of Hogarth.

In turn, Paul Englishby's score echoes Handelian recitative and arias, while the lyrics undermine its lush and wholesome beauty. "I pawned my baby's bottles," sings one gin-sozzled destitute, "I pawned my baby's bed. I would have sold my baby but I dropped it on its head." A gorgeously harmon-ised chorus, whose refrain runs "drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence", is sublime. As is a street-sellers' chorus built on the lines of Lionel Bart's "Who Will Buy?" from Oliver! Only here the lyricism is comically undermined by a hazelnut seller spasmodically declaiming "My nuts! My nuts!"

As ever, Tuckett has surrounded himself with a crack team. The two musicians exploit their versatility to sound like a band. And the cast – notably soprano Anna Dennis and baritone-falsetto Tom Solomon, but actually the whole cavorting, warbling pack of them – are superb. The evening also delights in the rudest lyrics and dirtiest double entendres you are likely to hear all year.

The Guardian

Judith Mackrell 

Hogarth famously occupies a place in the British dance canon though Ninette de Valois's 1935 ballet The Rake's Progress. But what former Royal Ballet dancer and choreographer Will Tuckett takes from the great man's satire is more like choreographed opera: a rude, ebullient and touching fusion of movement, text and song.

Pleasure's Progress comes vividly steeped in English wit and history, and, like much of Tuckett's best work, appears to have been created on a shoestring, its action conjured out of a few props and scraggy corsets. The conceit of the show is that it's being performed by inmates of Bedlam, who, under Hogarth's own direction, perform stories from his cartoons. Moll Hackabout, Viscountess Squanderfield and Tom Rakewell are among the shaven-headed, pox-ridden derelicts clamouring to tell of their fall "to the gutter and the gaol". Tuckett plays brilliantly to the strengths of his performers – alternately foregrounding singing and dance – but his cast are all multitalented. Matthew Hart's Rake is both funny and affecting, a big, exuberant adult-child puffed up with the naughtiness of his sins and bewildered by his punishment.

Paul Englishby's music and Alisdair Middleton's libretto create a delicious fusion of 18th- and 21st-century voices. Very occasionally, the work sags under the weight of its complicated structure, but it has moments of genius. The bawdy is exemplary in its mix of filth and elegance: a love duet invoking the pastoral delights of Squanderfield's "lady garden" blossoms with rococo innuendo. But you never stop hearing the stark, timeless note of Hogarth's satire. As the characters wreck their lives through gin, whoring and cards, Pleasure's Progress feels like a contemporary morality tale on the British compulsion to get wasted.  

The East Anglia Daily Times

James Hayward 

Hurrah for Dance East for their remarkable coup in capturing the world premiere of a new production from the Royal Opera House.

Will Tuckett’s Pleasure’s Progress, inspired by the works of 18th Century Brit artist William Hogarth, has been billed as a opera/ballet for the Skins generation, and his brief was to provide something that might make help make lyric theatre more accessible to teens, but this is not just any old piece of in-yer-face theatre for “yoof” – it is a inspired work of total theatre – boisterous, bawdy and bedazzling.

Hogarth’s etchings are fascinating and often gruesome depictions of life in early 18th Century London, especially its sordid underbelly. With a strong moralistic overtone they satirise the wages of sin and gin. Parallels between then and now are shocking – binge drinking was a huge social problem, and sexual transmitted diseases were epidemic. Then, offenders were placed in the stocks or confined to the horrors of Bedlam – now we put adverts about Chlamydia testing on the back of buses, but there’s no avoiding the timeless quality of the artist’s work.

Tuckett deftly creates a journey through Hogarth’s most famous pieces, The Harlot’s Progress, Marriage a la Mode, The Rake’s Progress and Gin Lane, by putting the artist himself on stage and having him direct a group of disturbed Bedlam inmates in re-enactments of his creations. There’s a cast of only seven singers and dancers, all excellent actors, but Tuckett’s brisk, bustling choreography gives the effect of a stage teeming with London’s lowlife.

Paul Englishby’s music is an appealing mix of English ballad styles and Handelian flourishes, and Alasdair Middleton’s witty libretto is a hoot – hilarity and depravity jostling for clever rhymes. The performers Matthew Hart, Laura Caldow, Clemmie Sveaas, Nuno Silva, Anna Dennis, Matthew Sharp and Tom Solomon are a supremely talented ensemble, with Solomon a finely etched Hogarth, switching effortlessly from light baritone to ringing countertenor and Dennis a beautifully lyrical soprano as Moll the harlot. Tuckett has also created a deeply moving solo for Laura Caldow as the doomed gin-addicted young mother, danced on pointe.

There are echoes of Marat/Sade and The Threepenny Opera, but, for all its Bedlam raggedness, this terrific show is no rag-bag of clashing disciplines. It’s a marriage of a la mode of theatre, opera and dance.

The Skins generation weren’t much in evidence on the opening night, but, at the risk of sounding like a dad trying to be trendy, I’d sum it up as wicked.