Duke Bluebeard’s Castle: cast illness hampers a restaging of Bartók that was perhaps doomed to fail

Back in 2009, English National Opera presented a dark production by Daniel Kramer of Bartók’s one-act opera about Duke Bluebeard and his new wife Judith; its eerie, creepy images of imprisoned children and violated wives still haunt my mind today. It was hardly surprising that the present version, advertised as “a semi-staged concert performance”, might not live up to that, but the enterprise was further complicated by the illness of one of the singers – and when there are only two singers that does tend to take the edge off the show. 

But full marks for bold ingenuity in the face of adversity: in the absence of the billed Judith, the role was split between Jennifer Johnson heroically singing the role on stage, while willowy assistant director Crispin Lord acted the part, giving a sinister twist to her relationship with Bluebeard. Unusually for English National Opera, the opera was sung in its original Hungarian, with extra-large English surtitles, while Leo Bill’s prologue set the scene in English.

The concept of Joe Hill-Gibbins’s semi-staging was straightforward: a huge long table around which John Relyea’s magnificently sung Bluebeard tried to placate Judith by opening the doors in his castle, metaphorically achieved by moving a few chairs. As the fine singer, Johnson was not confined to the wings but stood on one side of the table, while Bill’s prologue actor also took part in the action, wielding props and lights.

As the doors were opened in the text, copiously spilt red wine represented blood, gold glitter portrayed Bluebeard’s treasure, piles of flowers the scented garden of his domain, the silent lake of tears was under the table, and so on, until the final door was reluctantly opened to reveal Bluebeard’s former wives at the rear of the stage. These wives (I counted 15 of them, though there were only three in the original) were all white and virginal: were they untouched? They eventually retreated, and the opera finished with Bluebeard and Judith uneasily perched far from each other on the table as darkness fell, Relyea’s anguished Bluebeard a dismal man destroyed by his past.

Bartók’s score is a miracle of mood-setting: from the first eerie modal twist of the wind instruments (an unforgettable phrase) to the huge orchestral outbursts that bring a blaze of expressionist light into the stage picture, it is a vast symmetrical hour of music which from chromaticism veers towards an overwhelming C major at the centre and then back to the darkness. On Thursday, conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya powered the orchestra along strongly, and there were some tremendous sonorities, but there wasn’t quite the taut concentration in the quieter sections needed to ensure that the music made its full shocking effect.

In the end, you wondered if the attempt to semi-stage such a strongly symbolic piece was doomed to fail. As Leo Bill’s narrator reminded us, we do not know whether this is a story that happens outside in the world or within ourselves: leaving more space for our imagination to operate might increase its strangely compelling power.

Until March 23; eno.org