Despite the best efforts of a very good cast, and some fine singing, Olga Neuwirth's reinterpretation of Alban Berg's opera Lulu must be judged a fairly comprehensive failure on its own terms.
The most serious problem is its attempt to foreground the experience of the central character, who is only ever realised in relation to the men in her life in Berg's musical staging of Wedekind, falls well short of creating a modern feminist Lulu. Although she rises to the challenge of the music with some style, Angel Blue spends rather too much time changing her clothes or engaged on pantomimic violence for a more robust character to emerge, her lesbian relationship with Jacqui Dankworth's Eleanor is oddly understated.
Just as troubling is the setting of the piece in New Orleans in the specific time of the civil right's struggle and the campaigning of Martin Luther King. The I Have A Dream speech, which this production specifically marks the 50th anniversary of, is used in substantial recorded excerpts through the show, and its significance is, if anything, diminished by the experience. The music, although well played by the onstage Orchestra of Scottish Opera, is a somewhat confused concoction, and the direction of John Fulljames seems uncertain how to move the characters on Magda Willi's cluttered set, which the use of projections on a strand curtain does little to clarify.
Co-commissioned by The Opera Group and Komische Oper Berlin, and co-produced by The Opera Group, Scottish Opera, Bregenzer Festspiele and the Young Vic in association with the London Sinfonietta, it may well be that this Lulu is an example of a show with rather too many cooks.
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