The first night of English National Opera’s Bluebeard’s Castle (billed as a “concert semi-staging”, though there is considerably more to it than that) turned out to be unique, startling and completely unforgettable, thanks in no small measure to the unusual circumstances that surrounded it. Allison Cook, cast as Judith, withdrew from the performance late in the day because of illness. With only two hours’ rehearsal, Jennifer Johnston sang, not from the side of the stage, as one might expect, but as a costumed, albeit largely immobile presence within Joe Hill-Gibbins’s production. The role was acted, meanwhile, wonderfully well, by Crispin Lord, one of ENO’s staff directors, handsome yet androgynous in a white singlet and silk skirt, so that Bluebeard’s final partner, in a remarkable twist, effectively becomes his husband rather than his wife.
Bypassing at a stroke the perceived gender polarities that inform Bartók’s examination of marital disintegration, the end result is at once strikingly erotic and profoundly unsettling, particularly within the context of Hill-Gibbins’s chillingly beautiful staging.
John Relyea’s Bluebeard and the actor speaking the Prologue (Leo Bill) are at once doppelgangers and alter egos, and Bill remains on stage throughout, calmly supplying Bluebeard with what lies behind the unseen doors of his castle, as Relyea, facing Lord across a vast dining table, begins to disintegrate under the sexual and emotional pressure of it all. Everyday objects take on frightful resonances as cutlery becomes weaponry and wine turns to blood. Unlike some directors, who leave the gore to the audience’s imagination, Hill-Gibbins isn’t squeamish, and the stage is soon awash with it. By the end we have been painfully brought face to face with the accumulated detritus of Bluebeard’s life, but it is Judith who actually has blood on his/her hands, not he.
Much of it sounds formidable. Johnston, in a long overdue ENO debut, makes an outstanding Judith, carefully matching vocal inflection to Lord’s physical gestures, her tone caressingly beautiful in moments of affection, manipulative or otherwise, but turning from honey to steel in a flash as her demands for Bluebeard’s keys become terrifyingly insistent.
This is Relyea’s second Bluebeard in London, after his memorable 2021 performance with Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic at the Southbank. He is more reined in here, fractionally more sorrowful, and tellingly aware, almost from the outset, of the impending emotional catastrophe that he is powerless to prevent. Once past a low key start, conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya builds the tension inexorably, placing the climax not at the famous opening of the fifth door (overpowering though it is), but with the grinding dissonances that accompany Bluebeard’s yielding to Judith’s demands to give her the key to the seventh. The playing – the brass fierce, the strings rich and dark, the woodwind slithery like blood – is excellent.
• Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is at the Coliseum, London, until 23 March.
