Page 148 - FINAL_Theatre of Sound Coverage Book

Four days after enjoying my post-pandemic return to the Royal Festival Hall, I met
Bluebeard again a few blocks from Picadilly Circus, in one of those large
deconsemented churches that in London frequently serve for various theatrical and
musical shows. The temple has been renamed Stone Nest,but wasn't
the Limelight, the celebrity club legendary for the hedonism practiced in the 1980s
under its gloomy neo-Gothic vaults, there? That's right and what a great place for a
new opera company, Theatre of Sound, to debut with an alternative Bluebeard
Castle that shone as one of those theatrical miracles that occasionally take place in
the West End of the well-called theatre capital of the world.

The first discovery was the consistency of a score that does not need a full orchestral
version to elaborate on its anthological dramatic conviction. They only played a
clarinet, a horn, a violin, a viola, a cello and a piano, organ and celesta synthesizer
and the effect was of an intensity similar to that of a full orchestra. And in a small
arena surrounded by the gloomy ora, ora illuminated apparatus of Gothic arcades the
stage director developed the work as a suburban drama: an older man goes out with
some enthusiasm in search of his new flirt. And he returns with Judith to the first chord
to this rickety living room with an armchair, the occasional table, and a trunk that
contains the secret of the seven doors.

Each of them is nothing more than an opening to the past that the host has with
reluctance and drops to his new conquest, with the help of ghosts that arise from the
arcades: the first love (the door of torture is replaced here by that of pleasure),
enlistment in the army, the first woman, and the second, and two children who in a
Christmas celebration symbolize the fifth door of material possessions. And the death
of the firstborn that gives rise to the tears of the sixth door.

Two great international singers, Gerard Finley and Susan Bullock confronted in
English the small audience crowded around them with a firm voice and pulsating
articulation. The last door here, perhaps, is a liberation: Judith opens it looking at
herself in a small hand mirror where she sees the beauty of the previous women. And,
overwhelmed, she sits on the couch to accept the cup of coffee offered by Bluebeard.
Will he drink from it? The last chord is as suspensive as the image of that woman who
seems to reflect before agreeing to be Bluebeard's last wife.

Instead of explaining his conception with endless speech, the regisseur has included
only seven lines in the hand program. There it is recalled that Bartok has said that
Bluebeard is not a murderer but a man condemned to live alone. Their daily routine
has annihilated "the sacred feeling of love and even when their lovers live, they no
longer do so in this life." Nothing else. And nothing less.