In an evening where little was obvious, it was definitely a bad night for teddies. One had its head torn off as the violent accompaniment to a coloratura tour-de-force. Moments earlier, the backdrop had parted to reveal an entire wall of mutilated bears, clumsily taped back together. And, in one of the most disturbing moments of all, a human-scale teddy wandered on playing an accordion like a cameo in a horror film, before eventually removing its own oversized head to pick a fight with one of the singers.
Confused? I was, repeatedly, in these extraordinary performances of two supremely weird operas. The bears themselves were the work of directors Eleanor Burke and Harriet Taylor, who staged Bohuslav Martinů’s 1928 Larmes de Couteau and John Harbison’s 1977 Full Moon in March – the former as a kind of strip-lighted nightmare whirlwind of wedding cake, mannequins and that bear-accordionist; the latter as a differently nightmarish, highly stylised post-tonal sitcom unfolding around a four-poster bed.
