Wozzeck

William Kentridge, South Africa’s renowned master of ink and charcoal animations, delivers us a visual and musical feast in his direction and astonishingly kinetic design of Alban Berg’s 1925 opera.  Not that poor Wozzeck himself gets many crumbs. 

Based on Buchner’s fragmentary play a century earlier – arguably the first major tragedy with a common man as its hero – the impoverished Wozzeck is bullied, exploited and taunted; and finally driven mad by the world’s cruelty, murders his unfaithful wife.

This unrelenting torment is told on a towering war-ravaged set with trench-like planks through the rubble. Indeed, World War 1, with its mass slaughter, archaic command and industrial weaponry, haunts Kentridge’s Expressionistic drawings and animations which are continuously projected across Sabine Theunisssen’s set and backdrops.  With a huge chorus of 45 sometimes clambering through the clutter, amid the grainy wash and streaks of Kentridge’s urgent sketches, the opera is truly Wozzeck’s living nightmare.

Berg’s score, while atonal and fractured, gives each of the 15 scenes their own expressive, intense musical signature, matched also to Wozzeck’s varied tormenters. The pompous bonehead Captain (John Longmuir) bullies Wozzeck over his bastard child, the comic-grotesque Doctor (Richard Anderson) uses him for medical experiments while the hefty Drum Major (John Daszak) steals his wife. Only Lorina Gore as Marie has music anything close to lyrical, which, especially at her murder, she sings beautifully.

As Wozzeck’s fate is finally sealed, the rush to the end makes stupendous musical theatre.  Michael Honeyman leaps well through these shifting musical complexities with a Wozzeck truly ground into the earth, this one without a glimmer of pride.  And against Kentridge’s  spectacular world view, all the characters threaten to be cartoons lost in his swirling penmanship.

With costumes by another regular collaborator Greta Goris and conducted sharply by Andreas Molino, this Wozzeck long lingers as a glorious nightmare.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Keith Saunders