Bluebeard’s Castle
by Béla Bartok
Porchester Hall, London,
July 8th-10th
☆☆☆☆In mid-March 2020 – which feels now like eons ago – I waxed lyrical about a certain dancer, Carmine de Amicis, in his role as Jokanaan in a dance-theatre adaptation of Wilde’s Salomé . Then Covid19 struck and a hurdle-track of lockdowns prevented any live theatre from happening for a long, long time. Now that tentative steps are being made to make live theatre live again, I’m very pleased to see Carmine’s reappearance, this time in a dance-theatre piece inspired by Bartok’s opera, Bluebeard’s Castle (originally scheduled for last summer). It’s produced by Gothic Opera, a company of three sopranos (Béatrice de Larragoiti, Charlotte Osborn, and Alice Usher) specializing in performances of rarely-seen operatic works that take their inspiration from the Gothic. Their version of Marschner’s The Vampire presented a vampire who must gain consent before sinking his teeth into your neck, only to discover all the women are saying, “Please bite me because I’m so oppressed that the only way I’m going to get out of this situation is by outliving my oppressors.” That production was directed by Julia Mintzer, who has also directed Bluebeard’s Castle, which opened last night at London’s Porchester Hall for a covid-safe, socially-distanced, and fully-masked (though not the performers) run of three nights.
Last week, I chatted with Julia and Carmine to find out more about how they’ve queered the piece to bring in fresh nuances of homoeroticism and the uncanny malpractices of psychiatric quacks.
“We’ve really layered another story on top of Bartok’s opera, where rather than just these two people and their relationship we’ve divided up these characters and there are now six characters. We’ve divided the female protagonist, Judith, into two roles, one of whom is sung by Alexandra Long and one of them is danced by Carmine. And in addition to Bluebeard, we’ve added the voices of Bluebeard’s three dead wives”. The dead wives are played by three sopranos; sometimes they’re a part of the orchestra – singing the harp part, or the clarinet part – as well as doubling some of Bluebeard’s and Judith’s lines.”
The love story plays out, essentially, between Bluebeard and Carmine’s character, danced as Judith, Bluebeard’s latest bride, and traditionally the next of his murder victims. But Mintzer thought, “Do we really need to hear that story again about an abusive heterosexual relationship where the dude ends up killing her?” So, she and Amicis queered things up, turning the castle into a sanitorium, “like a pre-WWI hospital-cum-spa pseudo-scientific medical establishment much like Saranac Lake was that Dr Kellogg ran in the US”, she told me. Or the one depicted in Thomas Mann’s 1912 novel, The Magic Mountain. Béla Bartok himself ended his days in such a place.
In Mintzer’s hands, Bluebeard is now the charismatic leader of a cult, based on the Hungarian psychoanalyst, Sandor Ferenczi (the opera is sung in Hungarian with English titles). Ferenczi was a close friend of Freud’s until his conviction that all of his patients actually had been sexually abused in childhood caused a dispute between the two men. Unlike Freud, Ferenczi advocated that the therapist take a really, really active role in the therapy. “They were meant to share things about themselves and provide the warmth for the patient that their cold upbringing had deprived them”, Mintzer explains, “and how this manifested for him is what we would call medical malpractice in that he ended up shagging all of his patients.”
Into this sanitorium walks a new patient, Judith, her part danced by Carmine and sung by Alexandra Long. I discussed with Mintzer and Amicis the powerful homoerotics of having the part of Bluebeard’s wife performed by a male dancer. “Simon, the man who’s singing, is older than me, and has a bass voice, and the fact that I’m a younger man, you can’t take that away from the show. He’s a younger person who loves and adores this person, trusts this man, well do what you need with my body, it’s all yours, and then I come out completely naked, under his feet and I’m just like a deer who can’t get up. I make myself vulnerable. You see an older man having that relationship on a younger male body”, Amicis says, while Mintzer insists, “Carmine was the person I wanted to work with, so this character could’ve been played by a man, it could’ve been played by a woman, it could’ve been played by anyone of any gender dressed in any gendered way. It’s just that he was the right person. I’ve really been treating Carmine as an actor who uses dance as their language, as opposed to speech or singing.”
On stage for the entire hour’s duration, the dancer undergoes a series of harrowing psychiatric treatments in which each room in the castle is, the director’s words, “The patient’s response to a set of triggers, a psychological experiment where Bluebeard and his wives lead the patient on essentially a guided tour of their own consciousness. So, the first room is the torture chamber so what does this trigger bring up in Carmine’s subconscious and as Bluebeard explores Carmine’s mind in this way he falls more and more in love with him and crosses the boundaries as a therapist, as a doctor, that he should never cross, thereby undermining his authority as a doctor – and all hell breaks loose.”
The production includes a rebirthing scene involving a naked Amicis bursting forth from a prophylactic uterus dripping goo (courtesy of set and costume designer, Charles Ogilvie).
“This was all just my scheme to see which of my mates I could get covered in lube and put in a sack”, quips Mintzer, “That’s the reason for the whole show.”
As the queer love develops between the younger and the older man, the dead wives/followers of Bluebeard get jealous and react by trying to re-infantilize him, to put him back into the womb.
Mintzer says, “When Simon [Bluebeard] was asking me about that, saying is it relevant that Bluebeard is attracted to one gender or the other, it has nothing to do with that. The lust isn’t about Carmine’s body or the women’s bodies, it’s about power. His reaction and all the sexual dynamics just come out of power.”
The dancer/choreographer says, “I reconnect with personal past emotions which I put autobiographically into the work because each one of the rooms is a place for exploration. We have two different languages, dance, and projections. In terms of dance, each room has a different movement vocabulary that recalls a specific emotion linked to a certain time in my life and it’s quite an abstract place. Each room brings you to another level which is what dance can do, what the music can do. With dance, you can really articulate those abstract moments, musically, so I’ve been listening to the music a great deal.”
The piece is certainly powerful and the setting of Porchester Hall is suitably gothic with its caryatids and red velvet, the hall is made spookier yet with beams of light cutting through clouds of dry ice. I was gripped from the minute the show began, with the chime of a bell and a voiceover prologue in Hungarian. All the singers were captivating but Alexandra Long stood out as the voice of Judith, soaring and chilling at times as the dancer wrestles with demons. The gothic has always been a pretty queer art form but this new take on it (and a new arrangement of the music by Leon Haxby conducted by Thomas Payne) reveals the psychodrama at play beneath the story of a husband’s sadistic treatment of his young bride in a very arresting way.
Mintzer cites the work of Angela Carter as a particular inspiration, and it was Carter who once said, “I’m all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the bottles explode”. And those words came to mind last night as Carmine burst out of his amniotic sac one limb at a time and tentatively rose to stand, shaky as a newborn foal, the music and voices soaring around him in that gloomy cavernous space. With Bluebeard and his deputy in white lab coats, Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory also sprang to mind. It’s a visual and musical feast worthy of the term gothic which I’d recommend unreservedly.
Photo Credits : Nick Rutter and Quan Van Troung Photography.
Review by Jonathan KempQueerguru London Contributing Editor Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).
Labels: 2021, Bluebeard, Jonathan Kemp, London, opera, review
