Blowing the bloody doors off

As we waited for curtain-up on Scottish Opera’s new production of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle a member of staff walked out on stage. Don’t worry, he reassured us, he wasn’t about to announce that a member of the cast was indisposed. Nervous laughter from the auditorium. Still in the same matter-of-fact tone, he carried on, and I’ll admit that only at this point did I twig that this wasn’t a member of staff and that he was actually delivering a cleverly skewed version of the librettist Bela Balazs’s spoken prologue to the opera — something more often omitted than performed. Here, in a translation by Simon Rees, its bluntness coupled to that simple, unsettling theatrical trick worked superbly, establishing an atmosphere of vague unease that carried over into the opening scene.

Which was just as well, because the setting of Matthew Lenton’s production is a suburban living room, with a cheap sofa and a laptop open on a desk. Bluebeard (Robert Hayward) and Judith (Karen Cargill) stumble blearily on in dressing gowns and pyjamas, and by the time the first of the castle’s seven doors turns out to be that laptop, it’s all looking depressingly like a Bluebeard for the Gogglebox generation. Then, with the opening of the second door, jagged shards start to protrude from the soft furnishings. With the fourth door, predatory tendrils of foliage sprout from drawers and behind cushions; and a disgusted Judith finds blood on her hands. As the fifth door opens and trumpets appear in the stage-side boxes for Bartok’s shattering central climax, designer Kai Fischer’s set finally flies apart, leaving the characters in a surreal mindscape as uncanny and as potent as an image by Magritte.

It’s powerfully done. Lenton gauges precisely how far that initial gambit will carry him — and how far, too, he can lean on Hayward and Cargill’s tremendous individual performances.