When Keith Warner’s production of Berg’s Wozzeck was first produced at the Royal Opera, nine years ago, it made me more angry than any that I had ever seen. At its first revival in 2006, my response was milder, though still outraged. Now, on its third outing, I mind it even less, partly because the musical performance is so strong. Warner has returned to oversee this revival, which, if memory serves, is little different from the last one, so he still regards Wozzeck as the portrayal of an experiment, with Wozzeck as the guinea pig, and the rest of the cast, with minor exceptions, as his tormenting experimenters.
Most of the stage is a huge white room, suggesting a nightmare hospital or a morgue, and containing four large vitrines, with huge toadstools, etc. in three of them. The fourth, filled with formaldehyde, awaits Wozzeck’s self-immersion near the work’s close. Over on the left of the stage is Marie’s apartment, with their son present throughout. The contrast between the extreme frigidity of the main set and the suffocating intensity of Berg’s music is presumably intentional, especially with so musically attuned a person as Warner. The action is removed from any specific social context, unlike the wonderful ENO production that was unveiled a few months ago, and presumably has a metaphysical or existential dimension in the same way that Beckett’s plays do. So Wozzeck’s occasional ejaculation of ‘We poor people’ refers not to his and Marie’s material poverty, but to the human condition in general, or anyway to the condition of those who can be bossed around and abused by most of the people around them.
The trouble with that view of Wozzeck is that the world is not much like that, or large parts of it aren’t.
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