Alternative view

Which is where this production succeeds so well. For MT the absence of sets and props, the defiant drabness of costume (stark black suits and white shirts for all ages and genders), the provocative minimality of movement and gesture, combine to deprive the work of human plausibility (as well as going frequently against the extremely explicit and detailed letter of its instructions).

All this is true: another flagrant instance of the high-handed treatment opera lovers have come to expect and detest. This Lulu ought to be thoroughly guilty. But she’s innocent! It works: its severe economy obliterates the extraneous and distracting to focus hard and merciless upon essentials. Within the formalist straitjacket, so well attuned to the music’s secret severity of construction, is a play of gesture and facial nuance in tune with its almost mimetically precise surfaces. But the contradictions are also meaningful. No opera is so lavish as Lulu in affective pathos or richness of colour (in this latter Berg courts the kitsch of Korngold only to dangle it from his tweezers with elegant disdain). To match these in costumes and setting is replicative; to vie with them, counterproductive. Here, visual starvation makes powerful complement to aural juiciness.

Meanness enhances and intensifies the impact of music and story alike. And, to my understanding, this production makes more sense than I’ve found hitherto in some of the work’s more problematic aspects, conspicuous since the 1979 restitution of the third act left unhoned and partially unscored at Berg’s premature death 44 years before. One or two places, especially the unconvincing quartet wrought out of Alwa’s love-music, remain worrisome. But the act’s trajectory, from high-life yet louche Paris to prostitution, murder and Liebestod in sleazy East End London, carried me fully with it: and the composer’s own (rather, for once, than a director’s conceit) far-fetched identification of Lulu’s three clients with her three husbands was convincing, horrible, overwhelming.