Why would anyone want to adapt Berg’s Lulu, a masterpiece even if a problematic one? According to John Fulljames, who is the producer of the version of Lulu that Olga Neuwirth has come up with, ‘the Lulu plays now stand neutered within the familiar history of male authored texts which define women from a male perspective…Neuwirth turns this on its head. For the first time, Lulu is allowed to tell her own story…We [the audience] listen and watch but do nothing and so become complicit in her nightly repeated murder.’ How can people talk such nonsense? If Fulljames wants us to leap on to the stage and prevent Lulu’s murder, he is just joining the legendary spectator who did leap on to the stage to prevent Othello stifling Desdemona, a textbook case of someone confusing an actor with the character he portrays.
And as for telling the story from Lulu’s perspective, I’d have thought that one of the striking things about both Wedekind’s Lulu plays and Berg’s opera is that they seem not to be told from a perspective at all, the Ringmaster who opens the opera quickly disappearing and being an odd irrelevance. Of course the playwright and the composer couldn’t help being male, but I don’t see that Berg’s opera shows Lulu as depraved or victimised or whatever from a male standpoint, any more than Neuwirth’s ‘adaptation’ shows her as any of those things. And it is disingenuous of Neuwirth to write: ‘The composers of the Second Viennese School are well known for making adaptations of works by other composers’; they made arrangements of orchestral works for chamber groups, so that they could get performed more easily, but they didn’t mess around with them.
American Lulu is set between the 1950s and the 1970s, allowing Neuwirth not only to beat the drum for women’s liberation, but also for civil rights, so we get excerpts from Martin Luther King slotted in quite arbitrarily.
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