Showing @ King’s Theatre, Edinburgh Fri 30 & Sat 31 Aug @ 19:15

It has been 40 years since Martin Luther King Jr shared his dream for the future with over 250,000 people. So this rethinking of Alban Berg‘s opera set against a backdrop of the American Civil Rights Movement is a timely commemorative production.

Olga Neuwirth has reimagined Lulu as an African-American dancer in seedy New Orleans clubs, where police are bribed to let her perform naked for audiences full of white men. Neuwirth’s score is inspired by jazz, ragtime and blues, and the cuts in the music are punctuated with snippets of King’s speeches and the contemporary poetry of June Jordan.

Opera is not an art form usually associated with subtlety, which makes Frank Wedekind‘s original “sex tragedy” an excellent subject. Lulu’s journey from childhood victim to murdering vixen who tempts, torments, and ultimately destroys every man she meets can only work in such an overblown context. For generations Lulu has given voice to purely male fantasies and fears. Neuwirth is attempting her own form of liberation in allowing Lulu, at last, to have her own voice.

Whether Lulu truly has much of interest to say is still debatable. The first two acts are more or less true to Berg’s earlier opera. However it is in Neuwirth’s rewritten third act that the script is exposed as the weak link. When Lulu’s past lover Eleanor reappears as a successful jazz singer to sing about her free spirit and how she still loves Lulu but must be true to herself, it sounds as though her words have been lifted from a self-help manual. The fact that Lulu’s other conquests simultaneously appear in the background singing “We Shall Overcome” makes all that has come before look understated in comparison.

Perhaps this is an inherent problem with a female character who could only ever have been created by a man. Lulu may never be sympathetic, but it is refreshing to see a woman attempting to reclaim her voice.

Showing as part of the Edinburgh International Festival 2013