Opera - Peter Conrad on the ENO's latest sexual romp
Lulu - the polymorphous and gleefully perverse heroine of Frank Wedekind's sex tragedies, Pabst's film Pandora's Box, and Berg's opera - is the obscure object of everyone's desire. Both men and women yearn to possess her, but none of her suitors has any idea who she is. Nor do they care, as she is simply the projection of their own abject, idealising needs. They call her Nelly, Eva, Mignon and Adelaide as well as Lulu, and her aliases could also include Lola Lola, the Berlin tart played by Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, or Nabokov's Lolita: myth, as the orientalist Max Muller pointed out, is an exercise in polynymy, encouraging the single self to multiply. Lulu herself is bemused by her plurality. "Ich bin ein Wunderkind," she remarks in the opera (a line which Richard Stokes, translating Berg's libretto for the English National Opera's new production, provocatively converts into "I had a virgin birth").
Perhaps it is not surprising that she could cite the Virgin Mary as a predecessor, because at ENO the archetypal heroine has been trashily updated into Madonna. I mean Mrs Madge Ritchie, not the chaste maiden abstractly inseminated by the Holy Ghost. The programme for Richard Jones's production includes snaps of Madonna in a smattering of metamorphoses, posing as Monroe, Dietrich and Princess Diana. But Madonna is what the semioticians call a floating signifier: meaningless in herself, ready to assume whatever look the market considers saleable that season. She lacks Lulu's fascination, her mystery, and also the spirituality made audible in her astral coloratura or in her great outcry about freedom after she escapes from prison. Lulu is an immaterial girl.
Poor Lisa Saffer, doing her valiant best to sing the extraterrestrial notes, has been made to look like a trashy Madonna wannabe. In one scene she wears a cowgirl outfit, and for the tragic conclusion - reduced to whoring in London - she is kitted out in teetering lace-up boots, a vinyl bikini and a scarlet wig. It's hardly possible to care when she is hacked to death by Jack the Ripper. Except that, in this production, she does not actually die, because Jones sees her as a conscientious and versatile sex worker who collects her wages at the end of the opera and anonymously dons a raincoat before returning to the suburbs.
Lulu, like Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, is about desire, not sex. All Jones can offer is the kind of public rutting that now seems compulsory at the Coliseum. Lulu rewards Dr Schon with a blow job when he breaks off his engagement. In the temporary absence of any penis, she sucks on a gun barrel. Schon's besotted son Alwa signals his masochism by wearing a dog collar and tethering himself to a table leg. The Animal Tamer (Richard Poulton) who introduces the parade of human beasts is here the barker for a porn club, and he vouches for his fleshly wares by jerking off under his mac. "What the fuck?" asks one of Lulu's aggrieved lovers. That line does not come from Wedekind.
In a letter discussing Wedekind's plays, Berg called sensuality our surest means of access to "the depths of mankind", and wondered whether he should not have said "the heights of mankind": Eros is a god, and eroticism had been sublimated into a religion by romantic music. The role of Lulu was written for a high soprano because this was the kind of voice that Berg and his colleagues thought of as soulful. Saffer, for all her accuracy, merely sounds cute and chirpy, and her speaking voice - so important in such passages as her entreaty to Dr Schon - lacks the guttural reserves of plangency and despair Teresa Stratas brought to the role in the Paris and New York productions 20 years ago. Paul Daniel, conducting, misses the sickly, slithering chromatic anguish of the score.
Despite the simulation of depravity, everyone looks squirmingly English and embarrassed. Robert Hayward's Dr Schon catches the character's stiff propriety, but cannot manage his abrupt descent into violence. Jones in any case puts him out to pasture, turning him - just when he should be most erotically frenzied - into a gelded husband who potters over his flower beds. When he tries ineffectually to kill Lulu, he chooses to smother her with a cuddly pink bunny: that shows how dangerous he is. John Graham-Hall plays Alwa as a silly ass, which sabotages his infatuated vocal rhapsodies.
The advance publicity for the production announced that it would be set "in a range of periods from the 1920s to the 1980s", which sounds like a good idea. What we see, however, is becalmed in the 1960s, with flared trousers, starburst chandeliers, acid-green wallpaper, op art paintings and blush-coloured leatherette sofas. It's a mentally vacuous, visually hideous show, and I'm afraid it made me wonder why the English National Opera bothers to exist.
Lulu is at the London Coliseum, WC2 (020 7632 8300) until 30 May
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