A bruising encounter: Pina Bausch’s Bluebeard reviewed

Pina Bausch’s best work always hovered between the familiar and the unknown. The late choreographer revelled in borders and thresholds, the hinterlands where fantasies collide with reality. The gulf between men and women — their conflicting desires, instincts, clout — was one of her favourite trenches to plumb, so it’s no wonder she was drawn to Bluebeard. Her 1977 production was shown for the first time in the UK this month.

The show’s full title — Bluebeard. While Listening to a Tape Recording of Béla Bartók’s Opera ‘Duke Bluebeard’s Castle’ — is the first hint at its tangled drift. Splintered into cryptic scenes, some buoyant, some disturbingly visceral, it doesn’t narrate Perrault’s folk tale about a serial wife-killer but contemplates its violence: Bluebeard’s catapult between cruelty and melancholy, his new bride’s doomed bid for deliverance. It’s a dance of manipulation, with Bluebeard taking charge, usually through physical force. He even conducts the music, rewinding a tape recorder to replay snatches of Bartok’s early 20th-century score, though it’s Bausch who’s the real maestro here, flipping gloom on its head. Savage encounters turn frisky; jokey montages end in bodies beaten against walls. Nothing is straightforward — a riddle she would return to in works such as Café Müller (1978) and Victor (1986), resisting black-and-white moral scrutiny.

Christopher Tandy brings a brutal pragmatism to the title role — he doesn’t want to hurt you, but he will — while Silvia Farias Heredia is his terminally hopeful wife, bolting (and later limping) through dead leaves to dive into his arms once again. As the men of the ensemble creep and gurn, the women defer, swerving between fawning and frightened. They’re gifted a fleeting moment of dominance when they join forces and whip Bluebeard with their hair.