Wozzeck - Review of 2023 Aix-En-Provence Festival Production

Alban Berg’s Wozzeck is a complex opera based on a simple story. The Aix-en-Provence Festival assigned its productions to two masters of their genre, Simon Rattle to conduct and Simon McBurney to direct. The result is an astounding and thrilling performance at the Grande Theatre in Aix.
McBurney and Set Designer Miriam Buether have created a dark, bleak, dystopic world that Wozzeck and the other characters inhabit. There are large scale video clips, all in black and white, some showing details of Wozzeck or of the crowds. Wozzeck’s milieu looks unhinged the way he is or will certainly become. There are almost no realistic tableaux or scenes in which the opera is divided.
The opera usually begins with the poor soldier Wozzeck (Christian Gerhahera) shaving his obnoxious army Captain (Peter Hoare) who is reproaching him about his lack of morals especially his fathering a child out of wedlock. Wozzeck replies that it is difficult to be virtuous when one is poor.
This production does away with the shaving scene by placing Wozzeck on the parade ground with other soldiers and the Captain and a youngster in uniform poke him and insult him. Wozzeck has no choice but to endure it. The scene is vintage black and white with video projections of Wozzeck.
In the second scene Wozzeck and his friend Andres (Robert Lewis) are seen chopping firewood in an unrealistic forest and Wozzeck thinks the place is cursed and starts seeing things. We start to realize that Wozzeck may not be well.
Wozzeck’s house where we find Marie (Malin Bystrom), his mistress and the mother of his son, in the third scene, consists of a door in the centre of a revolving stage. It is indicative of the unrealistic and very sparse set. This is the story of a poor man beset by everything in a strange world.
The development of Wozzeck’s story continues with his encounter with his Doktor (Brindley Sheratt), an arrogant quack, appropriately nicknamed “coffin-nail” who experiments on Wozzeck.
The major attack on the hapless Wozzeck comes from Marie’s brazen infidelity with the dashing Drum Major (Thomas Blondelle). He is proud of his conquest. Wozzeck is beaten up by him when he tries to confront him and in the ultimate insult, Marie tells him that she would prefer a knife in her back to being touched by Wozzeck.
In the end she does get a knife and in a supremely dramatic and brilliantly staged scene Wozzeck is eventually drowned. It is an astonishing bit of staging as he appears to be fighting the water’s depth and the orchestra plays the music of his tragic end as he drowns. Unforgettable.
Bystrom sings and acts splendidly as Marie, a woman caught in a loveless marriage who loves her child but also loves the Drum Major. She has regrets about her behaviour and seeks solace and perhaps forgiveness for her sins by reading the Bible. This gives her some moral ambivalence without erasing her conduct.
Peter Horne as the Captain and Sharett as the Doktor are typical arrogant creeps who think nothing of mistreating their inferiors. Blondelle is superb as the swaggering Drum Major who gives in to the invitation of adultery by Marie and then brags about his conquest.
Simon Rattle conducts the London Symphony Orchestra through the complicated, indeed tortuous music with the assurance of a master. We never forget the music that accompanies and accentuates every step of Wozzeck’s life as we watch the descent of our anti-hero mentally and physically.
A stunning production.
Wozzeck by Alban Berg opened on July 7 and will be performed a total of five times until July 21, 2023, at the Grande Theatre de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France. www.festival-aix.com

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