Page 40 - FINAL_Theatre of Sound Coverage Book

Stephen Higgins

Speaking of her new translation, Daisy explains that she has “destroyed none of the
original … it’s true to the original Hungarian, which is beautiful, abstract and
ambiguous. The libretto doesn’t excavate Bluebeard’s character deeply. It’s a
desperately sad experience for both of them, a terrible process. The ‘locked doors’
suggest a ‘terror mentality’. In reinventing, we’ve kept that familiar mystique but have
taken the really precise specificity of the rooms in Bluebeard’s castle – the torture
chamber, the armoury, the treasury – and applied them to moments in one’s life: the
raising of a child, a marriage day, an argument. Often productions of the opera make
Bluebeard seem rather passive but when the doors are opened, he is proud of his
dominions. And, at the close three times, in a blank and monotonous tone, she says, “no
more”: it is Judith who doesn’t want any more doors – in our reimagining, portals to
memory – to be opened. And, we haven’t been literal: Judith doesn’t enter the chambers
– each door is an atmosphere.”

It strikes me that there is a comparable psychological element inherent in the original tale,
in that the girl’s desire to open the doors to the forbidden chambers is also a desire to find
the key to understanding her husband – something which is developed in later fiction,
such as Jane Eyre, which draws on the Bluebeard story and in which a female character
seeks to penetrate the mysteries, often sinister and threatening, of a man’s behaviour by
entering a forbidden chamber. And, more than this, that Balázs’ libretto presents the
relationship of Bluebeard and Judith as one in which true communication and love is not
possible, however deeply Judith longs for experience and knowledge, and however deeply