Bluebeard's Castle & Ewartung, Canadian Opera, Robert Lepage, 13 Oct 1994

OPERA
Bluebeard's Castle, Music by Bela’ Bartok, Libretto by Bela' Balazs

& Ewartung, Music by Arnold Shoenberg, Libretto by Marie Pappenheim

By The Canadian Opera Company State Theatre October 13 – 16, 1994

Melbourne Internatinoal Festival of the Arts

Reviewer: Kate Herbert o 13 October 1994

 

This review was published in the Melbourne Times after 13 October 199

 

Canadian Robert Lepage is a visionary theatre director who makes his opera debut with two short 20th century works for the Canadian Opera Company. Arnold Shoenberg's Ewartung (libretto by Marie Pappenheim) is performed in Hungarian and Bela' Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle (libretto by Bela' Balazs) in Hungarian, both being accompanied by English surtitles. Lepage has created spectacular theatrical imagery and a common thematic form for these pieces which are here for the International Festival.

 

Both pieces explore the dark side of the psyche. In Ewartung, J one psychotic moment is stretched into 40 chilling minutes while in Bluebeard's Castle Judith, the fourth wife of the murderous Duke Bluebeard, probes both the mind and past of her husband.

 

Bluebeard is an hour-long work for bass baritone (Richard Cowan) and mezzo-soprano (Jane Gilbert). Bartok's score takes a dark, sonorous and dramatic line and the resonant velvet smooth voice of Cowan with the rich, near-contralto texture of Gilbert enhance the fearsome violence of the work.

 

Soprano Rebecca Blankenship gives a flawless performance as The Woman in Ewartung. She may be singing solo, but she is never alone on stage. Lepage peoples her nightmare hallucinations with dancers and objects which appear and disappear in the mind of this vulnerable, neurotic figure.

 

The landscape is intimate and Dali-esque. Arms grip her through a wall, figures tilt horizontally.  Freud sits by, coolly taking notes in his office chair. The woman confronts the murdered body of her lover. As the story unfolds it becomes clear she has killed him through jealousy.

 

Bartok and Shoenberg are not easy listening either musically or linguistically, but the orchestra, conducted by the extraordinary and ebullient Bradshaw is exceptional.  The gold leaf picture framed stage and stark brickwork of the design by Michael Levine provide an enclosed, grim castle for Bluebeard, and a bleak internal wall for the raving woman in Ewartung.

 

One magnificent highlight is Robert Thompson's lighting which supports Lepage's concept with some of the most dramatic design I've seen in years. The seven doors of Bluebeard's benighted castle are opened to reveal glorious reflections of jewels, weaponry, gardens and red clouds drifting across a mountainscape. An extraordinary image of a "pool of tears" is also represented in an actual stream downstage which catches light and sends ripples of colour across the front scrim.

 

This pool is the site of the most spectacular images of the production. Bluebeard's dead wives emerge from under water, dripping blood: water tinged with the red glow of light. The space becomes elemental, the danger heightens, the violence is palpable. In Ewartung, the Woman's lover rolls in slow motion into the pool and disappears underwater. The image is rich and terrifying.

 

The sheer theatricality of the production and the stunning intensity and courageousness of Lepage's vision, make the discordant brass and atonal score of Shoenberg and the gloomy thrum of Bartok into a mesmerising evening of music and spectacle.

 

KATE HERBERT