REVIEW: COC’s Bluebeard’s Castle/Erwartung is a hypnotic exploration of light

Bluebeard’s Castle/Erwartung, a pairing of one-act operas from the first quarter of the 20th century, is a foundational brick in the Canadian Opera Company’s repertoire: the Robert Lepage-directed double bill has played Toronto several times since its acclaimed 1993 premiere, and has toured to multiple continents.

It was my first time experiencing the show, so I can’t speak to how the iteration onstage at the Four Seasons Centre for the Arts compares to versions past. Still, it was a rich experience. In Bluebeard’s Castle, composed by Béla Bartók, soprano Karen Cargill and bass-baritone Christian Van Horn — the only singers — wryly interweave legerity and heft; despite octaves of separation, their voices end up feeling disarmingly close in spirit. 

And while Arnold Schoenberg’s 30-minute monodrama Erwartung mostly plays like an epilogue to the imposing, doubly long Bluebeard’s Castle, soprano Anna Gabler floats hauntingly through its dense forest of dissonance. Johannes Debus leads the polished-as-ever COC Orchestra with confidence; revival director François Racine ably maneuvers the singers (and a handful of wordless actors) through Michael Levine’s grim sets.

Over the decades, Lepage’s production has received many reviews, including several in Toronto’s legacy papers, not to mention a couple in the New York Times and the New Yorker. Rather than retread the ground of an overall analysis, I’d like to zoom in on an element that particularly interested me: Simonovitch Prize-winning designer Robert Thomson’s expressionistic lighting for Bluebeard’s Castle, which nicely enriches the opera’s ambiguous psychological landscape.

Bluebeard’s Castle opens with the sight of a miniature castle rotating in a void of darkness. The petite fortress exudes a storybook quality — a weightlessness at first glance odd, given the violence of the narrative to come. What’s curious is that when the same image returns to conclude the opera, it’s loaded with a great deal more meaning. The power of Lepage, Levine, and Thomson’s visual approach lies in this transformation. They prepare the audience to see an identical object anew.

The rest of the show unfolds in a single, raked hallway, with a dungeon-like door barring the sole, upstage entrance. Béla Balázs’ Hungarian-language libretto, here surtitled in English and French, concerns one of the most messed up house tours I’ve ever witnessed: the titular Bluebeard invites his new wife Judith to his castle, and she demands the keys to a row of seven locked doors, behind which lurk violent secrets.

Judith says she wants to let light into Bluebeard’s gloomy castle, and Lepage makes the space oppressively dark, aside from the doors’ keyholes; through them, white light beams from stage right to the hallway’s opposite wall.

Each door opens to release a burst of illumination that’s different in colour and/or pattern from the keyholes’ neutral glow. A torture chamber spews a cloud of noxious green. An armoury judders out a flash of white squares. A vault crackles like a campfire. 

The fourth door guards a garden, matching its green, branch-patterned rectangle of light with a gust of petals and a translucent front projection of trees. (Media effects design is by Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy.) The next is more metaphysical; projections display a galactic image of Earth as Bluebeard introduces his all-powerful kingdom. And then arrives the ominous visual sparseness of a gentle rippling lake, which magnifies the spouses’ shadows against the wall.

The final unlocking dunks the stage in a sea of blood. Out march three women: undead incarnations of wives Bluebeard has murdered. On a platform slightly below floor level, they trudge through a wash of dark crimson, their feet cut off from the view of my seat in the orchestra section. Bluebeard explains that the zombie trio represents dawn, midday, and dusk — before inviting Judith to embody night. She accepts her fate without much struggle.

In this stygian rat trap, it’s striking that the ostensibly light-loving Judith becomes synonymous with darkness. Creepier still, Cargill plays the character with a knowing affect, communicated through a ravenously jagged physicality; the sight of bloodstains in the early chambers only makes her more desperate to complete her descent. 

Here, the production’s exploration of light collides with the libretto’s explicit subject matter of conjugal violence. How should we interpret the fact that Judith seems to enjoy her path toward zombified subjugation? This is a dour opera, and most of the obvious readings are depressing: perhaps in Judith’s world, the might of the patriarchy is so all-encompassing that the opportunity to become an undead queen seems a welcome escape. But as the doors open, Thomson’s lighting gestures toward so many different aesthetics — so many different ways of seeing, being — that I find myself wanting to shun the notion that Judith would be willing to subsume herself into Bluebeard’s empire; the contented way she stares at light underlines that she’s familiar with less bloody approaches to life. So is it all possible that she’s entering the afterlife with renegade intentions? That she’s travelling to the underworld with the aim of letting in the light? 

I realize I’m projecting contemporary values onto an early-20th-century libretto. But so, perhaps, are Lepage and Thomson. In any case, when the opening image returns as a bookend, it’s no longer the rotating model that interests me, but the surrounding sea of darkness, which now seems to represent our maybe-revolutionary queen of the night: filling the stage, dwarfing the miniature castle, presaging Thomson’s final blackout.

Bluebeard’s Castle/Erwartung runs at the Four Season Centre for the Arts until May 16. More information is available here.

Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

WRITTEN BY

Liam Donovan

Liam is Intermission’s senior editor. He lives in Toronto. His Substack newsletter is available at loamdonovan.substack.com.

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