REVIEW
Theatre Royal, Plymouth
Lulu is an ice queen in sequins in this 1920s opera by Austrian composer Alban Berg, staged like a 3D surrealist painting, its centrepiece a huge squishy bed apparently fashioned from enormous breasts and other female body parts.
Dominatrix and circus performer Lulu, sung with huge stamina and skill by Marie Arnet, has her sinuous way with a string of hapless men who fall, inevitably, for her hypnotic charms. There's something undeniably snake-like about her – it is not an accident, surely, that she emerges from a gossamer body bag at the beginning, and, sheds her sequinned dresses as often as she does men.
It was even quite funny in places as Lulu connived her way from conquest to conquest, destined as all opera heroines are, even avant garde ones, to descend into the gutter as a prostitute on the streets of London.
Special mention for Rebecca Afonwy-Jones, who stepped in at the last minute as Countess Geschwitz, the woman who truly loves Lulu so much that she'll stand in for her in prison, where she's doing penance for killing one of her lovers. And she dies alongside her, too, ending this bravura opera with beautiful arias.
SARAH PITT