Wozzeck: Wretches Like Us review – Berg’s horror opera is the most adrenaline-pumping of all time | Opera

Nsomeone came out of Wozzeck’s work thinking that what was needed was more to make it more difficult. A caution against excess, however, is not the case for Southbank’s Multitudes competition – gloriously so. Music and singing from the London Philharmonic and the original cast, conducted by Edward Gardner, combined here with the choreography of Ilya Shagalov, created by Nina Guseva, make Berg’s opera more exciting than ever.

Shagalov’s video, on the big screen behind the players, told the story of Wozzeck in thousands of pictures. The time was today, the place is a gray city, and Wozzeck part of the invisible workers hidden by their hi-vis clothing. With the translation of the German sung on the floor, the images sped up or turned slowly, always as if they were fixed – except for a moment after the murder of Marie, when the musicians joined in a terrible crescendo on one note. Then, and only then, did we see Wozzeck’s face move, and the result was as spine-chilling as it was minimal.

The only thing that didn’t work was the absence of Wozzeck and Marie’s child in the film – instead she was pregnant. In the final moments, when half a dozen children from the Tiffin Boys’ choir took to the stage in school uniforms to sing the lines that Berg gives to Wozzeck’s son and his classmates, they did not agree.

For the most part, the film was entertaining. Faces were sore, wrinkled and covered in rosacea one minute, pale, plastic and mannequin-like the next; the pictures could be a low profile or a high shot, and sometimes they looked very good and were made to look like old oil paintings – or Lucien Freuds. There was blood, lots of it, and, apparently when Wozzeck was the doctor, things other than squeamish. However, nothing is designed to cause fear.

Underneath the screen, a concert performance was taking place that would have been more than adequate for his purposes; if there was a problem it was that we couldn’t give enough attention to the singers. Peter Hoare was working his socks off as the Captain from behind his music from the start, and the rest, from Annette Dasch’s incisive Marie and Brindley Sherratt’s vital Doctor to Callum Thorpe’s resonant First Apprentice, were brilliant. Stéphane Degout’s singing wraps Wozzeck’s desperation in velvet, making the man a silent hero in his withdrawal. The play is said to be a one-off, but international festivals should be lining up to screen Shagalov’s film – if, like this one, they have the musicians to accompany it.