At the close of the first night of Wozzeck at the Coliseum there was a longer dead silence than I can remember after any operatic performance I have been to, and when applause began it sounded reluctant. Everyone was stunned by the intensity and involvingness of the preceding 100 minutes, the work having been performed straight through, no interval. Virtually every element in the production contributed to this shattering effect, and any shortcomings would be easily corrigible and with one exception trifling.
Perhaps the first thing to say is that the conducting of Edward Gardner and the playing of the ENO orchestra were at least as fine as any that I have heard in this work, achieving the remarkable feat of observing, as much as any set of performers ever has, Berg’s ‘analytical’ compositional methods, while also just avoiding recklessness in the passion of their commitment to this extraordinary score. Despite their fervour, they never drowned the singers, and almost every word of Richard Stokes’s excellent translation was audible.
That could have been undermined by a stupid production, but Carrie Cracknell, working with the set designer Tom Scutt, avoided the pitfalls that this opera is prone to, and came up with a claustrophobic and serviceable and direct account. The setting is contemporary, somewhere like RAF Brize Norton, with disabled soldiers returning in wheelchairs, dead ones in Union Jack-draped coffins. That could suggest that the weird behaviour of many of the characters is PTSD, but that certainly wasn’t emphasised, and one wouldn’t want it to be. One of the things that makes Wozzeck, the play and the opera, so oppressive is that one can’t profitably look for causes of the characters’ upsetting behaviour, they are just made that way.
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