Adapted by Alban Berg from two turn-of-the-century plays by Frank Wedekind and first performed in 1937, Lulu takes two of opera’s favourite themes – the fallen woman and the femme fatale – to unsettling extremes. Dancer Lulu is a manipulative siren with a powerful sexual hold over virtually any man that crosses her path. As the opera begins, her allure is sufficient to propel her through bourgeois society, but as her luck runs out and her beauty begins to fade, we witness her inevitable decline – a spiral that culminates in her working as a prostitute on the streets of London, only to fall prey to Jack the Ripper.
For this staging, the first at Convent garden for 28 years, Christof Loy has discarded the period trappings that sometimes clutter Lulu productions in favour of a minimalist approach emphasising the expressionist, proto-Brechtian qualities of Wedekind’s original plays. With its austere, contemporary aesthetic, Loy’s reading swaps the decadence of Weimar Germany for the empty banality of postmodern capitalism. The stage is bare but for a few props and the backdrop is a black, metal-edged wall. The cast are clad in 90’s office wear. There is a purposely alienated quality to the way characters interact onstage; when no longer in the action, they simply turn their backs and stand facing the wall, like sleeping automatons.
This emphasis on bare-bones psychological theatre has the advantage of allowing both the libretto and Berg’s bold, lush score to come to the fore. Arguably, an opera that can boast an animal trainer, an acrobat, a lesbian Countess and a slave-trading Marquis among its cast of characters has lurid colour enough. Yet such a denuded stage does present problems: in some scenes there is little sense of time, context or location, which will likely confuse anyone not familiar with the libretto.
Loy’s take on the opera hits a determinedly post-feminist note. Abandoned to the gutter as a child, Lulu is damaged goods, an abused child with a dysfunctional relationship to men, especially her sugar-daddy and childhood saviour, Dr Schon. This kind of overt psychological profiling of opera’s wicked women is a strategy increasingly used to explain unpalatable female behaviour to a contemporary audience – think of David McVicar’s recent Convent Garden Salome, whose Dance of the Seven Veils included a interlude depicting the girl’s abuse on the knee of her step-father, Herod. Lulu is not an opera that fits neatly into such comfortable interpretations. There is an amoral wildness running through Lulu that resists rationalisation. The material is of its time, ambivalent, and disturbing; the protagonist very much a projection of male fears and fantasies, and the story takes an undeniable voyeuristic pleasure in charting Lulu’s descent.
But Lulu also functions powerfully as an examination of the usury of men and the hypocrisies of patriarchal bourgeois society. Objectified and commoditised, Lulu is anything these men want her to be, to the extent that they variously call her Nelly, Mignon, Eva and Adeladie, names that feel like parodies of female tropes (her lesbian lover Countess Gerscwtich is the only character that calls her by her real name). Berg’s willingness to suspend judgement and empathise with Lulu and the desperate, brutal and brutalised characters that surround her, is what makes this opera so humane, and so modern. This modernity reaches its apotheosis in the final act, with the doubling of actors and characters that is Berg’s masterstroke. As she plies her trade in a London knocking shop, each of Lulu’s clients reminds her of one of her three husbands, and are played by the same actors. When the Ripper appears, he is played by the actor earlier cast as Dr Schon – Lulu’s sugar daddy has transmuted into her murderer.
Inevitably perhaps, this less-is-more production has split the critics. But more often than not tonight, Loy’s attempt to take Lulu into a more relevant contemporary milieu paid dividends. The 1990’s boardroom aesthetic meant that the credit crunch resonances of the first scene of Act 3 were pointed up nicely. This is a crucial watershed in the opera: the moment when Lulu’s party guests receive the news that the railway shares they were investing in have crashed coincides with the point at which Lulu’s personal stock, her own social capital, also begins to fall.
At its best, Loy’s grasp of the drama’s psychological underpinnings was thrillingly realised, peaking early in the emotionally and sexually charged exchanges between Lulu and Dr Schon in act one. The scene in which Lulu licked her freshly deceased young husband’s blood from Dr Schon’s fingers was horribly erotic, reminding us again that this opera has DNA in common with Strauss’s Salome. Likewise Loy’s handling of scene three of the first act, set in Lulu’s dressing room, brilliantly caught the fluid power relationship between these two characters. Desperate to thwart Dr Schon’s engagement to a respectable society woman, Lulu threatens to run away to Africa with a male admirer. His bluff called, Schon crumbles. After dictating a letter to him ditching his fiancée, Lulu smears Schon’s face with her stage make-up, feminising him, transforming him into a tragic and emasculated clown. In a matter of a few moments, we have seen just how in thrall this bourgeois Alpha male is to his girl from the gutter.
In the lead role Swedish soprano Agneta Eichenholz, making her convent Garden debut, struck a suitably chilly, protean figure, by turns blank, bemused, amoral, child-like and vampish. A pale, high-boned Audrey Hepburn with a nice line in slinky dresses, she switched through Lulu’s many faces with cattish grace. Her light, silvery voice remained secure throughout, coping admirably with the enormous demands of Berg’s rollercoaster vocal lines.
In the third act Philip Langridge, who doubled as the Prince and the Manservant, was magnificently seedy and menacing as the pimp-Marquis, bouncing Lulu sleazily on his knee as he threatened to send her to a brothel in Cairo. But it was Michael Volle’s peformance as Dr Schön that was this production’s centre of gravity. With his weighty tenor and compelling physicality, this singer threw himself into an electrifying externalisation of Schon’s inner life, his rendering of the character’s volatile mix of machismo and insecurity totally believable.
In the pit Antonio Pappano produced a beautifully transparent, almost chamber-like articulation of the score, saving the decibels for the big climaxes. Every nuance of Berg’s multi-layered musical themes was exposed, and Pappano expertly balanced the bold modernity of the twelve-tone orchestration with the unique emotional language and late romantic sweep that Berg brought to the serialism of his mentor, Arnold Schoenberg.
With its feel for the dark, anarchic undercurrents rippling beneath modern manners, at times this production seemed to breathe the same air as Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen; indeed, Lulu herself is the sort of creation Vinterberg’s running mate Lars von Trier has become famous for depicting, in films similarly preoccupied with charting the outer limits of female suffering, and which share some of the opera’s Brechtian qualities.
Stripped of its vaudeville feathers, tonight Lulu felt more than ever like a sort of postmodern reworking of Greek theatre. With its curious purity and unflinching sense of focus, this was a Lulu for the Dogme generation.
