‘Proud men and life-affirming women’ are, to quote the prologue, the poles of Alban Berg’s opera, Lulu and Frank Wedekind’s two plays—Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box—which are its textual base. Berg saw a private Viennese performance of the just-published Pandora’s Box in 1905, 23 years before he began work on the opera. Like the author before him, Berg was concerned to reflect the fundamental contradictions and absurdities of the human condition. Is this all nature or nurture? Is sex a creative or a destructive force?
Hence the male-female contrast with which play and opera confront us in the person of the Animal Trainer. He accuses us of being like animals brought up on a bland vegetable diet, our spirits sapped. This piece, he promises, will show us real wild animals; and he presents us with Lulu. That reveals the first stroke of genius in Simon Phillips’s new production for Opera Australia, which opened in Melbourne in April and which Sydney will see in October. The Animal Trainer calls an assistant to bring on ‘our snake’ and out comes sleazy and wheezy Schigolch (a sort of Beckett-Patrick White shambles) pushing a supermarket trolley hung with old plastic bags. We never know, in the opera, whether he’s Lulu’s father or an old pimp. He opens a big, soiled cardboard carton from which he draws a little girl, wearing the kind of saucy red dress in which we will soon see the ‘adult’ Lulu, knowingly twisting the strands of her blonde wig.
One could almost feel the chill of a shudder pass through the entire audience.‘The sweet innocent,’ the Trainer says, ‘My greatest treasure.’ It is the complexity of this central character that has eluded many of the Australian critics who have written about this production. The question, surely, is—as the American scholar, Carl Richard Mueller wrote in the Introduction to his translation of the plays—‘Who is Lulu? What is she? Lulu is all things and something different to every man. She is fact, she is myth; she is corporeal, she is idea; she is realist, she is ideal.’ In telescoping the two plays, Berg sought to reflect the lifecycle of this polychrome character by a second part which is the mirror image of the first: the three husbands whom she kills, inadvertently or deliberately, all return as clients of Lulu the prostitute, in sordid decline after her previous luxurious ascendancy. The third of them,