Conductor Mark Wigglesworth and director David Freeman go back a long way, at least to the mid-1980s, when Wigglesworth was music director during the heyday of Freeman's Opera Factory London. Now, though, both seem detached from mainstream operatic life in Britain. Freeman's talents are regularly ignored here by the major companies (except in the case of ENO, when it had a disaster like Gaddafi that needed to be rescued), and, though Wigglesworth was at one point rumoured to be in line to be ENO's music director, he will take up the same post at La Monnaie in Brussels in September instead. What London has lost and Belgium has gained is emphasised by the outstanding new Monnaie production of Wozzeck that Wigglesworth is conducting in Freeman's tautly disciplined staging.
Simplicity is the essence of Freeman's approach, allowing Berg's emotionally scarifying score to carry the real dramatic power, which, aided by superb playing from the Monnaie orchestra, Wigglesworth realises unflinchingly. Michael Simon's design is a bare, black-walled box, its floor covered in what looks like potting compost, and the action of each scene is concentrated in a different, tightly constrained area of that empty space. Even the tavern scenes occupy less than half of the stage, with just a few chairs as props between the milling, tangled bodies, and a pool of water for Marie's murder and Wozzeck's death.
Though a brief glimpse of tenor Tom Randle's buttocks during Marie's seduction by the Drum Major was enough to send a few marching to the exits, Freeman adds nothing gratuitous. Reinforced by some perfectly calculated lighting, his dramatic focus is unrelenting, and the disintegration of Dietrich Henschel's Wozzeck is presented with pitiless clarity. His singing is sometimes a touch soft-grained, but Henschel gives a remarkable portrayal of a man whose life force has been leached away and whose every halting, stiff-backed movement reveals that even the effort of walking is now as much as he can bear.
If Henschel is heartbreaking to watch, those around him, all in their different ways preying upon Wozzeck, are made expressionistically vivid. Solveig Kringelborn's Marie may not be vocally outstanding, but her weakness and vulnerability to Randle's macho, bullying Drum Major are touching. Douglas Nasrawi's Captain and Jan-Hendrik Rootering's top-hatted Doctor are poisonous period caricatures, from a cruel world through which Wozzeck passes without leaving any mark. None of it is for the faint-hearted, but it is horribly convincing.
· In rep until March 12. Box office: 00 32 70 23 39 39.
