Page 37 - FINAL_Theatre of Sound Coverage Book
P. 37
26 October 2021
Music opens the doors of memory: new opera
company, Theatre of Sound, launches with a
radical retelling of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle
Claire Seymour
Forbidden chambers, corpses dangling from wall-hooks, pools of clotted blood, stigmata
of guilt: ‘Bluebeard’, which first appeared in literary form in Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-
century collection, Tales of Mother Goose, is the stuff of nightmares. It tells of
transgressive desire and its dire consequences. A young girl’s desire for luxury proves
stronger than her distaste for blue beards. When she marries an affluent gentleman with
whiskers of that hue, her desire for knowledge of what lies beyond the locked doors he
forbids her to open proves stronger than her sense of wifely obedience. What she
discovers has all the ingredients of chilling Gothic horror, and her husband is revealed as
a psychotic serial killer worthy of Hitchcock. She uses her wits to survive just long enough
for her brothers – or, the case of Angela Carter’s retelling of the tale, ‘The Bloody Chamber’,
her wise, intrepid mother – to come to the rescue.
Perrault presents his tale as a moral about the evils of female curiosity, which ‘in spite of
its many charms/ Can bring with it serious regrets’. His heroine’s happy ending is brought
about by marriage to a ‘very worthy man who banished the memory of the miserable days
