Another fine mess

I wonder why ENO has invested in a new production of Berg’s Lulu, when the previous one, which we first saw in 2002 and then in 2005, was so brilliant as to be virtually definitive. (Of course, that last word is anathema to operatic ‘creative’ teams, for obvious reasons.) Not that this new one, directed by William Kentridge, isn’t good too, though it is excessively busy, compounding the hyperactivity of the score and action. It doesn’t do anything to clarify matters, though almost all the questions one is left asking are ones that the composer-librettist has set. The very full and useful notes in the programme trace the history of the Lulu plays and their transformation into the opera, in a way that makes clear what a mess it was how the whole thing slithered into being, both dramatically and, hardly separably, conceptually. What emerges with some degree of lucidity is that both Wedekind and Berg made artistic capital out of their highly ambivalent attitudes towards women and women’s sexuality, and hoped that by leaving their feelings unresolved and letting them coexist uneasily they would engender something that counted as a modern myth, and so make confusion seem deep and labyrinthine.