Lulu review – Kentridge makes Berg's opera a serious visual feast

English National Opera is the third port of call for William Kentridge’s production of Lulu, which was first staged in Amsterdam in June last year. Kentridge has supervised its latest incarnation on the Coliseum stage, and in its many ways it’s impossible to imagine the production without his involvement: everything about it seems an extension of his work as a visual artist, overflowing with his images, which are projected on to every available surface of Sabine Theunissen’s sets.

The visuals are tellingly allusive. They constantly make connections with the Viennese world in which Alban Berg composed his opera, and where a quarter of a century earlier he had first seen one of the Wedekind plays on which it is based. Images are projected of Lulu as she is seen by the men in her life who exploit her.. The film interlude, the dramatic watershed between the two scenes of the second act, piles up more of these images, and also throws in references to GW Pabst’s film of Pandora’s Box (the second of Wedekind’s plays), though in this production there is no portrait to accompany Lulu from scene to scene and husband to husband, just a pile of papers (Alwa’s manuscript) that is scattered to the wind in the final scene.

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Underneath it all, however, the treatment of the opera as drama is relatively conventional, and sometimes flits uneasily between naturalism and more cartoon-like stylisation. Kentridge adds a couple of extras, one a manservant straight out of the ministry of silly walks, the other a Lulu alter ego it seems, who is seated at a piano in the opening scenes but adopts a series of increasingly distracting poses on it as the opera goes on. But the sense of surreal farce and the deep black humour of some of it is distinctly underplayed. There were few laughs from the audience on the first night, but then Mark Wigglesworth’s account of the score – his final assignment at ENO for the foreseeable future presumably – is distinctly po-faced, too. Everything is extremely well played, and co-ordination between stage and pit is immaculate, but Berg’s score never soars as it can, never opens up those achingly deep emotional chasms that it does in the best performances.

Brenda Rae’s Lulu, tirelessly busy and vocally spot-on, is the enigmatic centre of it all, very much the blank slate on which men can project their own fantasies, almost oblivious to her own allure. The Countess Geschwitz is Sarah Connolly, straight out of a 1920s novel about redoubtable women, and the rather two-dimensional Dr Schön is James Morris, who barks much more than he sings. There’s much more substance to Nicky Spence’s wonderfully secure Alwa, and to Willard White’s Schigolch, more suave than he’s usually played and ambiguously closer to being Lulu’s pimp than her father.

ENO opts for the now standard Friedrich Cerha completion of the unfinished third act, but there were moments in its opening scene when one wishes they had gone for the tauter version by Eberhard Kloke used for WNO’s production in 2013. Musically and dramatically, that Cardiff staging remains the best we’ve had in the UK, but Kentridge’s production is a serious piece of work too, and ENO does it proud.