BY MARK BOSCH, LEAD CRITIC
Wozzeck
Opera Australia
Sydney Opera House, 25 January
Wozzeck!
Pronounced “vot-zeck”, the cast’s persistent and aggressive Sprechgesang utterances of the title character’s name stick in your head long after the curtains are drawn. His is a wretched existence, characterised by constant toil, cuckoldry, and internal conflict. He makes mere pennies for serving his Captain and being subjected to the nonsensical experiments of the character Doctor. His wife Marie is seduced by the brutish Drum-Major. His mind is falling apart: the moon is blood-red and fires seem to rage from the earth to the sky before his eyes.
The narrative is actually pretty simple, although this stunning joint production — between Opera Australia, the Metropolitan Opera, Salzburg Festival, and the Canadian Opera Company — is anything but. Some hours before the performance, I took the opportunity of spending a while with director William Kentridge’s exhibition That which we do not remember at the Art Gallery of NSW. Among the works presented there were some of the renowned South African artist’s sketches and animations for his previous stagings of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (2005) and Shostakovich’s The Nose (2010). Witnessing the painstaking yet effortless detail of these works is oddly meditative. They’re like a quick hit of that feeling you get soaking up a really good novel; each of them a repository of words, images, signs upon signs upon signs. They’re redolent with early 20th Century expressionism, but quietly timeless in how they seem, somehow or other, to survey all of human meaning-making.
Kentridge brings this tremendously attractive style to the Joan Sutherland Theatre with palimpsestual projections that distort and destruct – much like Wozzeck’s mind – over and upon the outstanding set designed by Sabine Theunissen, who also worked on the Mozart and Shostakovich productions. That Theunissen and Kentridge have a long working relationship should come as no surprise — their visions are utterly complementary. The intricate set has that musty, ligneous quality of Kammerspielfilme, but with twisting boardwalks, copious chairs (which the ensemble cast like to dance with), and a wardrobe first containing the Doctor’s carefully appointed, miniature office, and later, somehow, a whole stage band and sleeping quarters for a man who quietens the band’s tubist by tossing a pillow onto his bell.
The cast is completely self-assured, hopping around on what at least sticks in your head as a pretty treacherous jumble of objects. There were moments when the blocking of the main cast seemed a little stiff, no doubt due to the boardwalks being too narrow for the usual grandiosity, but this was more than made up for in the delightful tavern scenes. There’s something to be said for Urs Schönebaum’s standout lighting design here, too. When the taverngoers first appear on stage, bellowing a hunting song, they are saluted with the first really dramatic spotlighting in the production, and it’s thrilling.
Andrea Molino leads the orchestra through Berg’s similarly complex score with sensitivity; although the strings could afford to pack a meatier punch in the denser, more feverish passages. Otherwise, Michael Honeyman, Lorina Gore, John Daszak, John Longmuir, and Richard Anderson form an impeccable main cast. Honeyman’s character work is particularly subtle, portraying a sufficiently downtrodden and disturbed but never overly self-pitying Wozzeck. He and Gore have great chemistry, having previously collaborated in the 2017 Opera Australia and Covent Garden co-production of Szymanowski’s Król Roger (1924); another reasonably rarely performed opera, but with at least as much to offer audiences as Berg’s, and, I would argue, a lot of the usual fare. Do not hesitate to give this absurdly engaging production a try.
Images supplied. Credit: Keith Saunders.
