DeborahWarner

Press

• Berg - Wozzeck

  Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

  May 2023

  • These days, interpretations of the opera tend to lean towards either the psychological or sociological, but in her new Covent Garden production Deborah Warner finds a perhaps ideal balance. One of Britain’s leading stage directors, Warner is equally at home working in opera as in theatre, and the two converge here in Berg’s music drama. She has staged Wozzeck before, making her operatic debut with it at Opera North in 1993, and if anything this new interpretation feels more timeless.

    • John Allison, The Daily Telegraph
    • 20 May 2023

  • This Wozzeck comes soon after Warner’s Peter Grimes in this house, and it shares that show’s stark vision of the destitute and the marginalised, as well as the director’s minutely calibrated dramaturgy. The swift scene changes are well handled by designer Hyemi Shin, whose grungy, vaguely contemporary settings are offset with expressionist touches: the blood moon, a forest of bare trees. If the staging is not the “radically new vision” of the opera that Warner says she set out to make, it is as unsparing as the work needs to be.

    • Neil Fisher, The Times
    • 21 May 2023