When he died in 1837 at the age of twenty-three, Georg Büchner left fragments of a play called Woyzeck – a seminal work in European theatre. Kentridge’s re-imagining of Schubert’s Winterreise was one of the pivotal events of the Sydney Festival in 2016.  Unrelated, but a curious coincidence, saw a fascinating melding of Woyzeck and Winterreise – Woyzeck in Winter – premièred in Ireland in 2017, and then staged at the Barbican in London. Kentridge has been fascinated by Büchner’s unfinished play for many years and created a significant version of the work in 1992 with the innovative South African Handspring Puppet Company’ (which was crucial to Nick Stafford’s successful staging of Michael Morpurgo’s book Warhorse). Woyzeck on the Highveld transposed the middle-European setting of Büchner’s play to the hardships of the black workers in gold mines in South Africa.

Michael Honeyman as Wozzeck in Opera Australia's 2019 production of Wozzeck at the Sydney Opera House (photograph by Keith Saunders)

Kentridge’s first major directorial venture is like a palimpsest that underlies his recent, very different, directorial approach to Alban Berg’s opera, Wozzeck. Kentridge’s operatic conception transforms the gold mines into the battlefields of World War I. He observes: ‘the landscape we’ve worked with is halfway between a Johannesburg landscape and the blasted land of Flanders … stunted trees blown up by artillery shells, and dilapidated cities and buildings.’

This Wozzeck (a co-production between the Salzburg Festival, Opera Australia, the Canadian Opera Company, and the Metropolitan Opera) is, by any measure, an outstanding version of this seminal musical theatre work. It draws on biographical elements in Berg’s life. The war years were a formative experience for him. The opera, first performed in Berlin in 1925, is suffused with echoes and remnants of the conflict and the subsequent unstable years of the 1920s. A notable scene occurs in a military barracks where we see, and hear, rows of sleeping, snoring, soldiers. Berg first saw Büchner’s play in 1914 and felt an immediate empathy with the figure of Woyzeck, writing later to his wife of his own military experience: ‘There’s a bit of me in the figure of Woyzeck after all, ever since I’ve been spending these war years in a way that makes me just as dependent on hated people, tied, ailing, unfree, resigned, humiliated in fact.’

The opera is certainly one of the most influential of the twentieth century. Berg triumphantly demonstrated that the decisive break with tonality, initiated by Arnold Schoenberg and other adherents of the Second Viennese School, did not mean that large-scale tonal structures were the only means to create sustained drama in music, while at the same time demonstrating that this ‘new’ music could be profoundly expressive and, indeed, beautiful as well.

Despite the almost hundred years since its première, the opera remains a challenging, confronting work. It is not a comfortable night in the theatre. Kentridge’s familiar iconic visual style is gloriously in evidence in this production. The stage is constructed as a series of platforms and levels filled with fragments of staircases and broken furniture through which the characters clamber: a bizarre cupboard opens up to become the doctor’s consulting room.

John Longmuir as The Captain, Michael Honeyman as Wozzeck, and Richard Anderson as The Doctor in Opera Australia''s 2019 production of Wozzeck at the Sydney Opera House (photograph by Keith Saunders)

A constantly changing background is dominated by Kentridge’s theatrically animated, black-and-white charcoal drawings that pulse with life and portray a threatening world of crashed planes and looming Zeppelins. Close-ups reveal gruesome images of severed heads, offering kaleidoscopic views of damaged humanity, their utter desperation and alienation enhanced by ghostly gas masks. It is predominantly a world of black, white, and grey, but occasional bursts of colour serve to emphasise this bleak vision of hell. The action is framed by an ancient film projector with shaky images that stutter and fade.

Kentridge’s productions have been criticised as being overwhelmed by the florid visuality of the stage pictures, with not enough exploration of the psychology of the characters. But Kentridge reveals a deep understanding of his characters in his direction. The relationship between characters is clear and coherent as portrayed by the excellent cast assembled by Opera Australia for the local leg of this production.

The child of Wozzeck and Marie is ‘played’ by a puppet, providing a striking physical link to Kentridge’s earlier Woyzeck. But it is a problematic device that dehumanises the relationship between mother and child, and the heartbreaking final moments of the opera, with the child alone on stage and taunted by the older children about the death of Marie, were not as moving as they could be.

Heading the cast is the Wozzeck of Michael Honeyman and the Marie of Lorina Gore. Honeyman has been a stalwart in many Opera Australia productions, and he created a powerful portrayal of this most conflicted character. Wozzeck’s situation elicits our sympathy, but he is, in many ways, a rather unpleasant character, and Honeyman sustained this duality effectively. He coped admirably with the extensive Sprechgesang that Berg refined for the opera, revealing a flexible voice of nuance and latent power with excellent projection of the text.

Lorina Gore has made a speciality of characters in contemporary opera, most notably as Honey B in Brett Dean’s Bliss and Ophelia in Dean’s Hamlet. Marie, like Wozzeck, has unlikable aspects to her character, but Gore has such a winning stage personality that our empathy was immediately evoked. Vocally, she conveyed the myriad emotional fluctuations of the character. Occasionally, Gore lacked the bite in the sound to fully project the text in the lower register, but there was blazing power when needed. The limpid beauty of her voice was most apparent in the poignant scene when she reads from the Bible to her child.

Lorina Gore as Marie in Opera Australia's 2019 production of Wozzeck at the Sydney Opera House (photograph by Keith Saunders)

While Honeyman and Gore dominate the opera, smaller roles were vividly characterised, with the paranoidal Captain of John Longmuir particularly outstanding – a bravura and fearless vocal performance. The Drum-Major of John Daszak was suitably arrogant and preening, and although Richard Anderson’s Doctor was vocally challenged in the upper register, he conveyed the sinister menace of this unsettling figure whose bizarre medical experimentation has ominous pre-echoes of the Third Reich. Other roles sung by Dominica Matthews, Andres Virgilio Marino, Gennadi Dubinsky, Sitiveni Talei, and Shanul Sharma contributed to the richness of the depiction of this bleak world, effectively evoking the surreal and distorted atmosphere of Berg’s fractured creation.

The musical forces were led by conductor Andrea Molino, who brought out the aggression and jagged edges of Berg’s music as we enter the disintegrating mind of Wozzeck, but also the ethereal beauty of this stupendous score, no more so than in the moving D Minor interlude near the end. The creative team included set designer Sabine Theunissen, costumes by Greta Goiris, lighting by Urs Schönebaum, with projections and video by Catherine Meyburgh and Kim Gunning. Their contributions are essential to such a visual feast that underpins the drama.

While it is still early in 2019, yet following a heartfelt La Bohème and a vocally sumptuous Turandot, it is hard to imagine Opera Australia, or any other company, surpassing this outstanding production.

Wozzeck is being performed at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House, from 30 January to 15 February 2019. 

ABR Arts is generously supported by The Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund and the ABR Patrons.