Sterling soprano: Lisa Saffer in ENO's Lulu.
Photo: Tristram Kenton

Richard Jones's compelling production of Lulu, the first ever at English National Opera, presents a drama within a drama. The Prologue to Berg's score, in which an animal tamer introduces the characters to the audience, is turned on its head. Instead he welcomes the opera's protagonists, who perform in his tawdry clip-joint. At the final curtain the impresario returns to reveal that the knife with which Jack the Ripper has just dispatched the heroine is a trick one - no one has really died.

That doesn't so much deprive the piece of its visceral force as retrospectively distance us from its squalor and horror. For all but those opening and closing moments the action is vivid and immediate, with the surreal, almost farcical elements of the intricate story treated in faithful detail.

Paul Steinberg's fine-looking sets and Buki Shiff's eye-catching costumes commute backwards and forwards through the fads and fashions of the 20th century, emphasising the timelessness of the opera's themes. At the centre of it all is the portrayal of Lulu herself. [...]

Daily Telegraph
May 3, 2002

Rupert Christiansen reviews Lulu performed by the ENO, at the Coliseum.

This time, however, there's a difference. Whereas Calixto Bieito's Don Giovanni and A Masked Ball were simply infantile graffiti scrawled over classical masterpieces, Richard Jones's Lulu is fuelled by a sensitive adult intelligence. The sex is handled with artistic tact and the result is a performance of lucidity and elegance, which treads a firm path through one of the most problematic 20th-century operas.

Based on two plays by Frank Wedekind, Lulu is a mishmash of genres and styles. It contains proto-Expressionist elements, but in other respects is grimly naturalistic. Its tone veers between low farce and high tragedy, with a good deal of anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois satire in between. It ranks as the first opera to use film (for an episode charting the aftermath of Lulu's arrest for murder), and it is also long and slow-paced.

At the centre is the protean figure of Lulu herself - not so much a three-dimensional character as a male fantasy of the female id. Is she the victim of circumstances or an amoral monster? Both, probably. Does she have a soul at all? Wedekind, I think, believes not. But Alban Berg's music, with its tear-laden commentary on mankind's folly, adds other emotional dimensions to what could be merely a cynical cartoon drama.

Jones has honoured this rich humanity, and his production is without brutal exaggeration or gratuitous nastiness. Lisa Saffer's Lulu is a vanilla-flavoured baby doll, lacking in both the neurasthenic intensity that Teresa Stratas brought to the role and the bored ruthlessness suggested by Christine Schafer at Glyndebourne. This Lulu has a heart, but it's a small one which doesn't beat very hard. She's not so much viciously destructive as shallow, and the irony is that such a little bit of fluff could cause so much heartbreak.

The production eliminates the film sequence, but runs to some stupendous sets and costumes, designed respectively by Paul Steinberg and Buki Shiff. The location and period is unspecific, but a mid 20th-century American decadence and hypocrisy is suggested, with shades of a David Lynch movie.

What is most impressive, however, is Jones's skill at telling the story and keeping the dramatic thread taut, even though the nature of Berg's vocal writing makes it impossible to hear most of the spoken text. Fans of Jones's zanier work may be disappointed - there are few of his wacky trademarks, and his imagination doesn't seem to have taken wing on the implications of the piece as it did over Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades. But he has a grip on the piece's complexities, and this is a fine achievement. [...]

MusicWeb.UK
May 2002

After a sequence of variable productions and revivals it is a pleasure to welcome ENO's lavish premiere of Lulu in which everything went right. The expenses are shared in co-production with opera companies in Israel and Frankfurt and supported by the Friends of ENO and a syndicate of individuals. The three-act version completed by Friedrich Cerha makes for a full evening, but swift action ensures that tedium never sets in and enough of the words were audible to follow the steps of the eponymous anti-heroine's gradual descent to death in the arms of Jack the Ripper. [...]

The large cast was deployed skilfully in Paul Steinberg's stunning sets, often up and down a splendid stairway and into various hiding places. Pat Collins (lighting designer) was presumably responsible for one remarkable colour transformation of the walls.

A huge team effort, which will go into the annals of great productions of one of the most important 20 C. operas.

Berg’s score, much easier on the ear than that he composed for Wozzeck, is full of beauties – notably in the Interludes; it remains unfathomable why people persist in the belief that this is difficult music. Played as it was here, with lush and full-bodied tone, it resembled more the opulence of a Strauss tone poem. Indeed, the Second Interlude is pure Mahler. [...] Very rarely did the orchestra seem to overpower the singers (in fact, this only ever happened in the Cerha completed Act III).

Richard Jones’ production gives this Lulu a seedy 1950s feel to it. Opening on the façade of a peepshow, with its mixed clientele paying for entrance – pure Michael Huhn imagery – a chiffon curtain is raised to allow us to peek beyond the window, all jungle imagery with a lone Lulu standing like a puppet amidst the greenery. This is the artist’s studio, an unquestionably appropriate place for the copulation which follows – animalistic in its brutality, simple in its instinctive loveless foreplay. The set designs for this production are lavishly detailed – whether it be the theatre dressing room with its tableau of fluffy bears, or cheap china dogs inanimately placed around the room like spectators, or the room in Dr Schön’s house with its impressionable comfort, the setting for his brutal murder.

The same room a year later opens with Countess Geschwitz in nurses uniform – the colour of the previous settings bleached white, rather as if the set from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had mysteriously appeared from nowhere. By the time we get to Act III the contrasts between the Paris and London sets are poles apart – the former opulent to emphasise the greed of the share dealing, the latter a base barren wasteland with just a sofa to illuminate the tawdriness of Lulu’s first day as a prostitute. Alwa’s syphilitic insanity isn’t so much displayed as an institutionalised illness but a symptom of poverty and neglect. Gone is the handsome suitor; he is now a chained madman closer than ever to the baseness of Lulu’s own condition. When Countess Geschwitz arrives with the lost portrait of Lulu it is not a complete picture – just the head shorn from the rest of the canvas. And whilst Lulu’s first client is a bible bashing conversionist, her last is the hell that is Jack the Ripper. Lulu’s death is almost done behind closed doors, yet its brutality is not questioned. Neither is the attack on the Countess, pure stalk and slash.

Jones leaves his most shocking revelation to last – we return full circle to the opening set and the front of the peepshow. The clientele leave, the familiar figures of Alwa and the Countess and then Lulu, hiding behind dark glasses and a raincoat, leave as well. The chiffon curtains falls – we, the audience, have been spectators on our own peepshow. It is an unexpected reversal, and an effective one.

Buki Shiff’s costume designs are effective, if a little uninspired at times. Lulu is either dressed in opulent ball gowns or leather; Countess Geschwitz is mostly power dressed; the men are rather non-descript, and Jack the Ripper hardly the shock he should ideally be in a striped sweater (and not even a Freddy Kruger one). Lighting by Pat Collins is effectively done.

[...] Although I remain unconvinced that Frederich Cerha’s Third Act completion is wholly satisfactory this was one of the most compelling productions of Lulu I have seen. It is gritty and beautiful in equal measure, and a triumph for ENO.

Alban Berg’s long but unfinished, late-romantic masterpiece has finally been given a worthy London airing.
Richard Jones’s thoroughly integrated production skates effortlessly from the ‘30s to the ‘50s (with one or two unobtrusive later references), giving prominence to the stark physical and psychological drama unfolding on stage. Rarely - in recent years - has there been such a meeting of minds and talents on the London stage.
This opera is difficult for so many reasons. Perhaps the most important is that Wedekind’s subject matter is distasteful: suicide, murder, prostitution, adultery, incest of sorts, lesbianism - und so weiter. Some of the first night audience did leave at the first interval; but they were a very small minority and they seemed to leave in awe, as if they had been tourists unwittingly visiting the temple of Baal or Dionysos and suddenly became aware of an other-worldliness about the experience.
In the opera Berg elevates these human failings to the level of the ordinary, the banal; the only thing that lifts any of his characters above the ordinary is their costume - and here Lulu stars, sometimes changing clothes in the middle of a scene, sometimes hardly clothed at all. Strangely, what might have been a coup de theatre - Lulu’s dropping of her dressing gown for a little muff diving by Alwa - was somewhat anti-climactic. We had already seen so much that we had been dulled to the experience - surely Berg’s intention, achieved in this inventive production.
What’s it all about? This is the question that has remained on my mind after every other viewing of Lulu. The Jack the Ripper story is the easy part, but it occupies only ten minutes of the three hours. Who and what is Lulu? Berg was much more straightforward in Wozzeck; it is obvious that one ought to identify with the common man in all of his weaknesses and faults - in the case of Wozzeck a dark extreme. Perhaps because I am male I find it more difficult to identify with Lulu, but I do not find it impossible - and this production has made it almost easy. [...]
The production is unobtrusively ingenious. Wedekind’s story and Berg’s score can hardly have been set in any single place or era; rather they are best given the universalisation of Hollywood. This is precisely what set designer Paul Steinberg and costume designer Buki Shiff have achieved.
This quasi-cinematic treatment also helps to bring out the way Lulu challenges various orthodoxies: the Professor of Medicine who drops dead à la Keystone Cops; the Painter’s melodramatic (and unnecessary) suicide which is only made real by the cinematic device of not showing it to us; the shooting of Schön (Sr) - one can’t imagine him with his clothes off! - and the demise of Schön (Jr), humiliated by life itself as well as by Lulu. All of this is thought-provoking, unlike other productions which have emphasised the disintegrative aspects of the opera or simply degenerated into slapstick. [...] One not to miss.

The parents of Frank Wederkind, author of the plays on which Berg's Lulu is based, called him Benjamin Franklin. An American name was one of several points of similarity Wederkind shared with the late Billy Wilder. Wilder worked, briefly, in the sex industry while a struggling journalist; Wederkind, also a professional writer, was an enthusiastic customer. (You have to admire a man who tore a ligament in his jaw during a heavy session.) Both were cynical but obsessive observers of sex and human nastiness in all forms, and the Lulu plays, like Double indemnity or Ace in the hole, present the self-dramatization of the male ego on a massive scale, disrupted by the refusal of the women at the centre of the drama to play along.

A theatrical milieu is already an essential component of the earlier, Franco-German, genre to which the figure of Lulu herself belongs: she is called Mignon, after Wilhelm Meister's beloved, and the theatrical milieu is a recurring feature of both the picaresque and the Bildungsroman. As her many names suggest, Lulu is das Ewigweibliches in the contemporary flesh, a sister of Manon in her girlhood corruption and sleazy pimping relative but also in her many adventures defined but not controlled by her current "owner". The difference between Lulu and Manon and the rest is that she does not have one true lover: she is the only person who cares about her, although she always needs a man to run her. In this, she is also the grandmother of Roxy Hart in Chicago, another merry murderess who wants to be big in show business.

Richard Jones, in his new production at the ENO, shared with the New Israeli Opera Company and Frankfurt am Main, sees Lulu as an archetypical central European-American sleazy farce, with the sex made explicit and fun. The setting is a peepshow, and the animals are part of the kitsch decor of the Professor's home in the first scene, as well metaphors for human nature. The decor of each scene is entertaining in itself, amusingly camp in the first two acts in its satire of the different style of domesticity just as Lulu's costumes change to reflect the different men's fantasies about her (one of which is that she is Louise Brooks in Pabst's movie). There is much comic business, rushing to and fro in pursuit and hiding of erections, not only in the deliberate Viennese farce of the first scene of act 2. The frontage of the peepshow descends again at the end, and we are shown that Jack's knife is a stage knife with a retracting blade. The implication seems to be that the whole production is another projection of the director's, and the audience's, fantasies on to Lulu, who has as always survived intact, in one sense at least. Being dead is just another change of costume for her, or, perhaps, surviving is just another acrobatic trick.

Casting Lulu is always a problem. For many, Brooks still has strict control over the imagination, which reinforces the point that Lulu must be stunningly desirable and never a victim. Perhaps she shouldn't be as beautiful and classy as Brooks (like Roxy, she should probably be the sort of woman who could have a lip sore -- Alwa gets syphilis from her). And for Berg's Lulu, she must also have a high soprano voice with superb technique. [...]

London, Coliseum
04/30/2002 - and 10, 16, 18, 23, 25, 28, 30 May
Alban Berg: Lulu
Lisa Saffer (Lulu), Susan Parry (Geschwitz), Rebecca de Pont Davies (Dresser/Schoolboy/Waiter), Graeme Danby (Professor of Medicine/Theatre Manager/Banker/First Client), Richard Coxon (Painter/Second Client), Robert Hayward (Dr Schön/Jack the Ripper), John Graham-Hall (Alwa), Gwynne Howell (Schigolch), Robert Poulton (Animal Tamer/Acrobat), Nigel Robson (African Prince/Manservant/Marquis)

Paul Daniel (conductor), Richard Jones

ENO Orchestra

Eduardo Benarroch
LULU EN LOS DESBOCADOS AÑOS '60…

© Copyright Eduardo Benarroch - Mayo de 2002