Wozzeck, Royal Opera House, review

Two big names at the head of the cast ensured a full house for this revival of Berg’s masterpiece, but they aren’t the reason to see it. Simon Keenlyside, in dryish voice, takes the title role. All his superb musicianship and thoughtful enunciation are not enough to make his interpretation convincing; he plays the viciously browbeaten and existentially challenged squaddie as a shuffling, blinking idiot (the spectre of Michael Crawford in Some Mothers do have ’em was forcibly if unintentionally evoked), thereby sentimentalising him into nothing but the victim of a cruel world. This Wozzeck only has two dimensions.

As his mistress Marie, Karita Mattila has a brave stab at turning herself into a raddled, lascivious, gold-digging slut, but fools nobody – she was born a diva in the grand style and that’s what she remains, woozy intonation and all. A woman such as this would never have given a depressive loser like Wozzeck a second look: the relationship never became credible.

But emotional realism isn’t something that this production chooses to emphasise. Keith Warner’s staging presents the action in a giant white-tiled chamber, suggestive of a laboratory or mental hospital. A drop curtain shows the cross-section of a brain, large vitrines contain scientific specimens: this is a fable, we are firmly being told, in which nature and human beings are dissected, examined and processed without imagination or pity.

But this clinical environment drains the opera of the compassion which saturates the music, making the drama seem flat and diagrammatic. We need to feel a dirty tenement, a smoky dive, a spooky wood – instead we get fancy tricks with mirrors and a palaver which leaves Wozzeck pickled in formaldehyde and floating in the vitrine with the aid of a snorkel. Such meaningless gimmicks obscure the simplicity of the tragedy: a tale of the brutalised poor in the rookeries of a nasty little army town.

John Tomlinson and Gerhard Siegel as the Doctor and Captain give smart cartoon performances which fit the concept but leave one feeling clobbered, and Berg’s intentions are only truly honoured in the pit, where Mark Elder conducts a densely textured and richly coloured account of the score which makes the orchestra sound as plush as the Berlin Philharmonic.

They, at least, penetrate to the dark heart of this devastating work.

Until Nov 15. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk