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Visionary
drama gets rewarding Covent Garden performance
REVIEW - WOZZECK
Royal Opera House By Helen Lawrence
ALBAN Berg’s Wozzeck, written in 1921, returned
to Covent Garden on Monday in Keith Warner’s widely admired
production.
It is a setting of Büchner’s extraordinarily radical
1830s’ drama about a downtrodden man driven to madness
and murder.
Reflecting the turmoil in political ideas in Europe set off
by the French Revolution, it anticipated 20th-century expressionism.
Stefanos Lazaridis’s brilliant set, together with Rick
Fisher’s superb lighting, creates a frightening nightmare
world enclosed in the mildewing white-tile walls of the mad
doctor’s experimental lab.
A coup de theatre mirror window opens upstage revealing scenes
which symbolize Wozzeck’s hallucinatory world. Clever use
of descending panels creates Wozzeck and Marie’s hovel.
Their illegitimate child (Remi Manzi, from Moss Hall School
in Finchley) is on stage throughout, witnessing the social victimisation
of his parents.
The alienation of the play’s protagonist, the wise fool,
relentlessly bullied, humiliated and subjected to cruel and
pointless experiments by his superiors, and betrayed by Marie’s
infidelity, comes across vividly in Johan Reuter’s moving
performance, conveyed by gesture and body language as well as
through a beautiful, expressive voice.
Susan Bullock makes Marie a convincing character but her singing
disappoints, with harsh top notes and under-projected middle
and low voice.
Kurt Rydl as the fanatical Doctor, anticipating the horrors
of Nazi Germany, and Graham Clark’s obsessive Captain were
richly and powerfully sung and persuasively acted, as were all
the smaller parts.
Under the baton of Daniel Harding, the score seemed too fragmented,
lacking in an overview of the work. Too often the richly scored
brass parts drowned the singers. Nevertheless, overall a rewarding
performance of this remarkable, visionary work.
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