The danger of asking two different directors (and indeed two different companies) to split a double-bill between them is that each tries to be more of a radical dude than the other. I wonder how much the thought of preceding Fabulous Beast’s revisionist The Rite of Spring (see below) affected young Daniel Kramer as he planned his English National Opera staging of Bluebeard. If he was determined not to be upstaged he certainly succeeded, but in a way that I found pretty repulsive.
He has reconceived Bart?k’s 1911 masterpiece as a gory and gratuitous anthem to serial killers, rapists, torturers and paedophiles — with particular reference to the ghastly Josef Fritzl (the revelation of nine traumatised, Von Trapp-like children locked in cells is the “high point” of the show) and, at the end — as Bluebeard’s four incarcerated wives spread their legs to reveal bloodied upper thighs — Jack the Ripper. How nice. No wonder there were 30 seconds of stunned, or embarrassed, silence at the end.
True, Kramer comes up with clever stagecraft — even if, on opening night, the ritualistic revelation of Bluebeard’s horror chambers threatened to come to a shuddering halt when a sliding panel refused to budge. The film-noirish opening — a lamppost and sinister door in Giles Cadle’s black-as-night set — evokes the seedy alley where psychopathic sadists such as Clive Bayley’s wonderfully nuanced and spine-shiveringly sung Bluebeard, with his Dr Strangelove twitches and Napoleonic delusions, prey on the vulnerable.
Then a revolve is cunningly used to suggest Bluebeard leading Michaela Martens’s trusting, naive Judith down a labyrinthine passage into the grisly recesses of his own warped mind. As she demands that more and more doors are opened, so their relationship reverses. Initially he had shrunk, terrified and impotent, from her impassioned advances. Now, undisputed tyrant in his own perverted kingdom (all the more horrifying for being so mundane and suburban) he can inflict his own, rather more violent variety of advances on her.
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All this is effectively portrayed, though Martens articulates hardly a single word clearly. But towards the end Kramer’s desire to shock produces a kind of operatic snuff pornography that I found nauseating. The piece doesn’t need this jejune explicitness. Bart?k’s searingly violent score, admirably delivered by Edward Gardner and the ENO orchestra, spells it out much more chillingly.