American Lulu – review

Olga Neuwirth's American Lulu is billed as "a new interpretation" of Alban Berg's great unfinished opera, Lulu. Neuwirth's aim was to take a fresh look at Lulu from a female perspective, and to set her mythical rise and fall against a backdrop of the US civil rights movement. The score rehashes parts of Berg's original for an on-stage ensemble that sort of resembles a jazz big band, and adds a new third act that is dramatically clumsy, musically forced and conceptually futile. The action shifts to the US in the 1970s with flashbacks to the 1950s, where a black Lulu takes centre stage among predominantly white men, and Martin Luther King speeches are crudely spliced into the musical fabric.

The opera was broadly panned at its premiere in Berlin last year, so the hope was that John Fulljames's new co-production for Scottish Opera and The Opera Group might be more convincing. It's not. All the issues Neuwirth tries to address – gender and race, power and victimhood, capitalism and exploitation – fall flat in this feebly made drama, and we are left with none of the enigmatic intrigue of Berg's opera and the Wedekind play on which it is based. Worse, in fact: broad political themes are shoehorned in around characters whose vapidity and lack of chemistry make their motives and relationships utterly implausible. This new interpretation is supposed to empower Lulu to tell her own story, but ends up making her seem as if she's got nothing to tell.