in Toulouse, the madness of “Wozzeck” through the eyes of a child
Among the eagerly awaited shows of this lyric revival season in France, the new production of Wozzeck, de Berg, presented at the Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse, which to say the least is that it keeps all its promises. It succeeds in fact what makes opera an unprecedented art when it manages with such obviousness to merge emotion and intelligence, drama and music. Michel Fau’s previous Toulouse staging in 2019 – Ariadne in Naxos, by Richard Strauss – did not win our membership. This time, we have to bow to the relevance of a dramaturgical work whose main idea passes the drama through the sieve of a child’s gaze, the illegitimate fruit of Marie’s connection with soldier Wozzeck. A vision more singular than it will appear, most of the interpretations of Berg’s masterpiece denouncing the social oppression and the psychic misery of the character taken from the eponymous play by Georg Büchner.
No gratuitous derision in this universe which declines with a greedy freedom, realism and phantasmagoria
The director introduces a theater of shadows and cruelty, that which trots in the head of a frightened little boy (masterly silent omnipresence of the young Dimitri Doré), populated by monstrous appearances like that of the diabolical rabbit of the Song of the hunter, the Gypsy thief of children whose mother, Marie, threatens her, or the Angel of sleep whom she calls to her rest. Childish dreams in which the characters of the two Workers will concretely dress in a sort ofChild and spells Fr horrible version. Thrown into the proscenium after the violent death of his mother, slaughtered by Wozzeck, the child will stop his ears in a long and terrible silent howl, a startling vision of the Shout, by Edvard Munch, crystallized by an immense orchestral crescendo beaten to the point of unbearable.
There is no gratuitous derision in this universe which declines with a realistic and phantasmagorical greedy freedom, mixes expressionism and naturalism of German cinema of the 1920s, the world of pantomime and puppet theater. Thus the triumvirate of the “stalkers” of Wozzeck: the sadistic Captain of operetta with the blond curls encrusted, the Mad Doctor dancing in his white coat of exterminator, the virile and brutal Drum-Major in the paces of lead soldier who will cuckold him before. to beat him publicly. We could comment for a long time on the decor of this poor man’s room, which revives the rules of unity of action and place of classical theater: a bed with large prison iron bars, a crucifix whose volume will intensify until ‘to close up the space with a phantasm of salvation, a coarse brown blanket of troufion, – in turn protection, shroud, and place of perdition, as in this “Raft of the Medusa” formed by the drunken soldiery of the barracks around a shipwrecked Wozzeck.
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