Unsuccessful productions of Berg’s first opera are rare. Wozzeck is one of those works – Britten’s The Turn of the Screw is another – that seem hard to get wrong on stage, that are dramatically so tightly plotted and intensely wrought musically that the drama plays out unfalteringly, without the need for too much directorial intervention. Georg Büchner’s fragmentary 1836 play, from which Berg took his libretto, may be set in the late 18th century, but the pathetic plight of its central character, driven to madness and murder by poverty, exploitation and sexual jealousy, is timeless and universal.
Perhaps that robustness explains the rather neutral quality of Deborah Warner’s new production for the Royal Opera, which often seems to go out of its way to avoid being too specific. The designs by Hyemi Shin veer between a detailed naturalism, which fixes the production somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, and the minimally abstract. The opening scene is set in a toilet block complete with a row of lavatories (conjuring memories of ENO’s infamous A Masked Ball!) and a constant traffic of pissing squaddies, where Wozzeck (Christian Gerhaher) is working as a cleaner, while his final humiliation at the hands of the strutting Drum Major (Clay Hilley) and his cronies takes place in a barrack room festooned with clothes lines. Yet other scenes – Marie’s bible reading, her murder and Wozzeck’s subsequent drowning are all acted out on a virtually empty stage, relieved only by some gorgeously coloured backcloths.
