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diverge in this darkest of pieces, giving us either an allegorical fable about
love and the secrets we keep, or a brutal domestic drama.

It had to happen eventually that we got both: one day; two different
performances; two entirely different answers.

The first starts in traditional fairytale fashion. An unmarked doorway on
Shaftesbury Avenue plunges you out of jostling crowds and into a disused
chapel, arches rising to a curved dome.

However, within this fantasy space, newly formed company Theatre of
Sound creates a staging that trades the fantastical horror of Bluebeard’s
castle and its bloody walls, for something else.

An ordinary, domestic interior greets us. There are photos arranged neatly
on side-tables, too many lamps and a new box of PG Tips. But the floors
buck and tilt at odd angles, and the dramatic ground is anything but firm

beneath our feet.

Into this space Bluebeard (Gerald Finley) leads his wife Judith (Susan

Bullock). This isn’t the just-married arrival we expect, nor is she the young
bride. This, it quickly becomes clear, is the return home of the dementia
patient, guided at every turn by a husband who is both comfort and
stranger, now clung-to, now shrunk-from.

The “doors” Judith insists on opening become objects that each hold a
memory of an episode from their lives. Youth and happiness give way to
tragedy, relived fresh and shocking.