Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

Castle of Despair

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

by Béla Bartók, libretto by Béla Balázs

English National Opera at the London Coliseum until 23^rd March

Review by Patrick Shorrock

ENO’s current season comes to a brilliant and triumphant end, despite its lack of support from the mean-minded Arts Council.  How a company, that so thoroughly meets the Council’s own criteria of excellence, inclusion and diversity, fail to be properly supported by it remains a mystery.  It is hard to avoid the conclusion that it hates opera for being expensive. 

Bartók’s bleak one act masterpiece is well performed by ENO, without a follow up piece to lighten the mood and prevent the audience from slitting its wrists.  Its sheer intensity means that we don’t end up feeling that we have only had half an opera, any more than we do after Salome or Elektra, but you do end up leaving the Coliseum feeling rather depressed. 

The evening was billed as a semi-staged concert performance.  This was nonsense.  It is completely fully staged, with a director, set designer (Rosanna Vize) and lighting designer (Ian Jackson-French).  Or would have been if Allison Cook had not been ill and replaced as Judith at the very last minute by Jennifer Johnston (in thrilling and voluptuous voice but, reasonably enough, staying behind a music stand).  This meant that Crispin Lord “walked the part”, wearing a dress but very much male and further queering this already strange and disturbing piece.  Johnston was placed in the centre of the stage wearing a similar white two piece to Lord, which meant that your attention was divided between the two of them.  I did rather regret that they didn’t put Johnston at the side of the stage so that we could have focussed on the action.  However, there was a kind of interesting doubling on the part of both characters, as Leo Bill, who delivered the sardonic prologue, wore evening dress like Bluebeard and acted as his factotum. 

The director, Joe Hill-Gibbins, is very much from the let’s-make-as-much-mess-on-stage-as-possible school.  (See his Changeling at the Young Vic and his Richard II at the Almeida for evidence.)  But he is also formidably talented and ensures that this chilling piece makes its full impact. 

The curtain rises on a huge white table that you just know will not remain pristine for long.  Bluebeard’s torture chamber behind the first door is represented by several bottles of red wine being poured into an overflowing glass; the armoury by large quantities of cutlery; the garden by vast and unmanageable bouquets; and the treasury by thousands of fragments of shiny gold paper thrown out of a box.  These all leave the table in a terrible and sticky state, before Bluebeard’s kingdom is depicted by voluptuous lighting and the Vale of Tears by total darkness apart from a single torch.  For the seventh room, a screen opens to reveal no fewer than fifteen veiled and silent brides.  The intensity is remarkable with John Relyea a sinister, sexy, but also vulnerable Bluebeard.  As with his Wotan, the voice takes on a raw, bitter quality, when more beauty of tone is called for. 

Oddly for a company that sings in English, the piece was done in Hungarian, which was a shame, as I think it would have made more dramatic impact in English.  It is not as though Relyea or Johnston are native Hungarian speakers. 

Much of the drama in this piece comes from the orchestra who played superbly under Lidiya Yankovskaya, leaving the wrenching dissonances of the score to slither round in the memory like a box of the most venomous of snakes.  Shattering. 

Patrick Shorrock, March 2024

Photography by Nirah Sanghani