Wiener Festwochen’s Lulu is profoundly unsettling — review

It takes a while to figure out what is going on. Marlene Monteiro Freitas is a choreographer, new to the world of opera, and her staging of Lulu is as much a work of contemporary dance as it is a take on Alban Berg’s unfinished masterpiece.

While the Theater an der Wien is renovated, the company is without a home. For this production, Freitas embraces the sterile modernity of Halle E in Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier, using its featureless white podium to create a strangely futuristic, abstract space, peopled by robotic, genderless oddballs. Singers and dancers are seamlessly integrated, all characters in a merciless world of alienation, where passion, love, intrigue, murder and abuse are narrated or noted rather than acted out.

If you can let go of the expectation of more conventional music theatre, this has numerous advantages. The pure physicality of the act of singing is celebrated, keeping the music firmly centre stage; Freitas’s jerky, idiosyncratic choreography is also minutely observed in its musicality, often illustrating the lines of the score. And in its abstraction, this retelling finally liberates Lulu from the baggage of an irredeemably dated concept of femininity, something few iterations achieve with such finality. Lulu is the snake, the seductress, the femme fatale, the ultimate celebration of the “look what you made me do” apologists. But place her in a world beyond gender, and the protagonists become responsible for their own destinies. It is refreshing.

And Vienna’s magnificent ORF Orchestra, recently rescued from threatened extinction, is literally centre stage, on a podium behind the singers. Maxime Pascal conducts with voluptuous sensuality, bringing out the work’s lyricism with such starkness that it becomes almost painful, never losing clarity. The cast is superb. Vera-Lotte Boecker is a shatteringly good Lulu, fragile yet hard as steel, piercing and vulnerable, as sure of herself as she is lost in an uncaring world, with intonation clear as glass and effortless virtuosity. Bo Skovhus dominates as Dr Schön, often physically threatening, omnipresent, making the part consummately his own, alongside impressive performances from Edgaras Montvidas, Cameron Becker and Anne Sofie von Otter and their peers as rival lovers, and Kurt Rydl’s marvellously creepy Schigolch.

This staging ends where Berg left off, with stretches of unaccompanied spoken dialogue and a postlude from the orchestral Lulu Suite, for which Freitas adds a painfully mutant wedding scene, part Chagall, part child bride, part nightmare, full of inexpressibly warped horror.

In its detachment and ambiguity, this is a profoundly unsettling Lulu, and the director’s team was roundly booed in curtain calls. But should Lulu ever be comfortable viewing?

★★★★☆

To June 6, festwochen.at