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Published: 18 November, 2010
by SEBASTIAN TAYLOR

THE puppet dog made in Hornsey gets star billing in the UK premiere of Russian composer Alexander Raskatov’s first opera A Dog’s Heart at the English National Opera this Saturday.

In a storyline worthy of HG Wells, a professor implants human testicles and pituitary gland into a dog named Sharik which then becomes more and more human as time passes, resulting in all manner of chaos.

Sharik is a mongrel of a kind unlikely to be seen on Hampstead Heath or Regent’s Park... or anywhere else for that matter. It’s three feet high, made of wood and aluminium with black plastic trim and a wired head.

The dog has been made by master puppeteers Blind Summit at their Hornsey workshop.

This is not company’s first puppet to feature in opera. Anthony Minghella’s production of Madame Butterfly at the ENO used a Blind Summit puppet to take the part of the lovelorn heroine’s child, to considerable effect.

The company’s puppets will also be in action at the Royal Opera House production of Will Tucket’s magical Faeries show in the Linbury Theatre in December and January – a festive season “must” for families with younger children.

A Dog’s Heart is an ENO co-production with De Nederlanse Opera in collaboration with theatre company Complicite and Blind Summit. Its plot is based on the classic novella by Mikhail Bulgakov, one of the Soviet era’s best-known writers. Banned under Stalin’s rule in 1925 and not published until 1987, Bulgakov’s critical satire of the mid-1920s Soviet Union is now regarded with great respect.

Quotes from the work include “Never read Soviet newspapers before dinner” that could easily apply to at least one of our national newspapers.

There must have been concerns about the risks involved in staging the Frankenstein-like opera. Poorly directed, it could well have become the laughing stock of the opera world.

But in the hands of Simon McBurney, director of theatre company Complicite, the risks may well have been worth taking.