Page 123 - FINAL_Theatre of Sound Coverage Book

An Intimate, Thoroughly Chilling Bluebeard

By Clive Paget, Musical America

LONDON--In opera, directorial “concepts” can sometimes be frustrating, distorting or even
overwhelming a composer’s intentions. That Daisy Evans’s powerful re-imagining of
Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle as an exploration of a couple wrestling with dementia works so
completely is a testament to both the director’s assured reading of the text and the conviction
of Gerald Finley and Susan Bullock in bringing it convincingly to life. The production, seen
on November 6, is staged by the newly formed Theatre of Sound in the intimate yet imposing
ambience of Stone Nest, a former Presbyterian church (and in the 1980s, home of the
hedonistic Limelight nightclub) in the heart of London's West End.

Béla Balázs’s libretto for Bartók’s 1911 opera is based on Charles Perrault’s famous 17th-
century tale of a wife-murdering French duke. But Balázs was essentially a Symbolist poet,
more interested in exploring the inner lives and buried memories of Bluebeard and his latest
wife Judith. In traditional stagings, Judith confronts her fears and the rumors about her
husband’s former life through a determined questioning that pries open the past to disastrous
effect. In Bluebeard’s mysterious castle, the last of seven doors is opened to reveal three
former wives—a rollcall that Judith is then compelled to join. But Bartók was clear that his
Bluebeard was no murderer. His opera, he maintained, was an allegory in which a lonely man
must come to terms with previous loves that live on only as memory.

Susan Bullock and Gerald Finley in a reimagined Bluebeard