Lulu
Royal Opera House
It’s not often that I have felt so disinclined to write a piece about the past week’s opera-going, especially when it was an occasion I had looked forward to so much: Berg’s second opera Lulu, one of the strangest works in the repertoire, but even if not a masterpiece — it’s very hard to say what it is — a work of enduring fascination.
However, if you had the misfortune to encounter it for the first time in the Royal Opera’s new production by Christof Loy you would be entitled to wonder whether it was a work of any fascination at all, and not just a long-winded and perhaps unsavoury bore. At least the Royal Opera’s production of Wozzeck, fearful as it is, stimulates rage: this one merely leaves you glazed and immobilised. The setting is a tripartite screen, white some of the time, black the rest, with white strip lighting above; and a single chair. All the males, with fleeting exceptions, are dressed in dark-grey office suits and ties; the women in dark dresses, with the odd more elaborate skirt, rapidly shed. The cast stand and face the audience, expressionless as possible, and sing. It isn’t at all like a concert performance. It is like — it is — an anti-staged performance, in which each singer is drained of character. The Lulu of Agneta Eichenholz radiates non-allure. She looks blank or bored, doesn’t move about much, and copes with the notes to moderate effect. If she were in a living production her vocal shortcomings might not be so patent, but there is nothing else to concentrate on. For the one blow-job she administers, to her first client in Act III, she is out of sight in the wings, and one sees his back, his mild giving at the knees, and his zipping up.
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