Page 91 - FINAL_Theatre of Sound Coverage Book

and dramatic performances, Finley proving particularly trenchant with both notes and the sung English-language
text. (Evans was credited as translator.)

Whereas the original libretto shows the newly married Judith constantly demanding access from Bluebeard to the
locked rooms of his symbolic castle, Evans’s staging was more domestic in its visual presentation. A room
furnished with old-fashioned chairs and lamps was the setting, which turned the central figures into a long-
married husband and wife; the wife was suffering from dementia and the husband attempting to deal with it.
Both of them, though perhaps to varying degrees, were engrossed in memories of the past conjured up through
the contents of a suitcase that Judith initially insists on being opened up and which replaced the original’s seven
door.

As Judith took out individual items and was visibly affected by the strong emotional memories attached to them,
five additional, unnamed silent characters intermittently appeared, three of them representing Judith herself at
earlier stages of their marriage, the other two the couple’s children, one of whom was a male child who clearly
died in early adulthood.

Dementia is such a prevalent illness that everyone is likely to find themselves, whether directly or indirectly,
impacted by it: Evans’s staging, designed by Adrian Linford, lit by Jake Wiltshire, and acted with commitment by
both principals, inevitably possessed resonance for anyone in attendance. However relevant this tragic disease is
to our everyday lives, this staging presented a very different dramatic set-up for Bluebeard than that envisioned
by the composer and his librettist Béla Balázs. No operatic plot, it seems, can be played these days without being
transposed into something at best vaguely parallel: another chamber-scale version seen in London earlier in July
2021—Julia Mintzer’s staging for Gothic Opera—presented Bluebeard as a Svengali-like “doctor” heading a
sanatorium for those with nervous conditions, with Judith as his chief patient.

In this new rethink of the piece, there was nothing really sinister about Bluebeard at all. But on many levels the
result was worthwhile; and it was certainly a coup to attract artists of this calibre to take part in what was
essentially a fringe production. Though different in dramatic scope and a good deal smaller than the original, the
show summoned up a certain potency of its own.

—George Hall