Béla Bartók - Duke Bluebeard's Castle
Irish National Opera, Dublin - 2018
André de Ridder, Enda Walsh, Joshua Bloom, Paula Murrihy, Elijah O'Sullivan
The Gaiety Theatre, Dublin - 13 October 2018
The
new Irish National Opera's inaugural season is promising to be an
ambitious and varied one, and not just in terms of repertoire and
touring productions; they've also taken the opportunity to draw on
Ireland's tremendous singing, musical and theatrical resources. For
Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle sung in Hungarian, a work that for all its
brevity is no mean challenge, the Irish National Opera have called upon
playwright Enda Walsh to direct the production.
Walsh is
no stranger to opera, having worked as librettist and director on
Donnacha Dennehy's The Last Hotel and The Second Violinist, and he
brings some familiar touches to Bartók's darkly fascinating Duke
Bluebeard's Castle. The director comes to the work apparently with some
preconceptions, but finds that such a work inevitably exerts it own
power and meaning, and in a way he manages to deliver on both proposals.
It's not as if the underlying moral of Bluebeard's
Castle is difficult to work out. Judith comes to the Castle as the new
wife of Duke Bluebeard and wants to know everything about her husband,
all his dark secrets, good and bad, and Bluebeard has quite a
reputation, not least for the unknown fate of his previous wives. Walsh
puts emphasis on the allegorical aspect of Judith wishing to open the
seven locked doors of the castle and shed some light into its dark
corners, adding sound effects of creaks, groans and eerie noises that
suggest something terrifying lying in those inaccessible recesses.
In
terms of creating atmosphere and tension, it's highly effective and
complementary to Bartók's menacing score, but Walsh also sees the opera
as an exploration of a couple who are just getting to know each other,
testing out each other's limits and seeking to establish dominant roles.
The old-fashioned gender distinctions are still there, but dropping
Duke from the opera's title and dressing the couple in modern clothes,
Walsh wants to use them consider how this applies to a modern marriage
and whether there is indeed any significant difference in who literally
holds the keys to the relationship.
Emphasising the
allegorical, there's no physical opening of doors in Jamie Vartan's set
design other than the fissure that runs down the middle of the
formidable solid-looking stone wall at the back of the stage. The
revelation of the other rooms, revealing masculine obsessions with
power, money and violence, are shown in those abstract terms as
projections and shifts of light and colour, putting emphasis not on
their allure but on some sense of horror and shame that lies behind
their acquisition.
All of this builds up of course to the
sinister mystery of what lies behind the seventh door and, as I've
said, Enda Walsh - following along with the slow mounting tension and blasts
of horror in Bartók's score - builds the tension superbly with great
attention to atmosphere. There really is a sense of mounting
dread as the wall parts to reveal what is behind the final locked door;
and the revelation is chilling (almost literally, as you can feel the
cold air rush forward from the back of the stage of the Gaiety Theatre).
Bluebeard's three wives emerge, confronting Judith with the knowledge
that Bluebeard has also had deep relationships with other women,
something that she needs to know, but once she does (and in the light of
revelations of Bluebeard's true nature from the other rooms) it forever
changes how she sees her husband.
The decision to dress
the three gothically pale former wives in dusty faded 18th century ball
gowns doesn't really fit with the modern aesthetic elsewhere in the
production, but that's almost certainly intentional. If Walsh is
applying the allegory of Duke Bluebeard's Castle to a modern
relationship, the fate of Judith to similarly accept the old-fashioned
attire of the previous wives only emphasises the reality that nothing
has changed, that the distinctions and roles remain largely the same as
they have been since the dark ages. The allegorical nature of the work
allows room to consider the moral as not quite simplistic as all men are
domineering aggressive brutes with dark silent desires and women are
fatally victim of their own insatiable curiosity and pushiness.
Walsh
perhaps can't risk leaving it on that note, so there is another
revelation lying deeper within the seventh room, one that explains the
significance of the young boy at the start of the opera (padding out the
short length of the one-act work) by building a speaker and delivering
an additional message in English before the traditional Hungarian
prologue. The revelation of abandoned children sitting among ruins
could be a reference to the disturbing proclivities of Gilles de Rais,
the real-life inspiration for Duke Bluebeard, but it also opens the
hermetic relationship drama out to the realities of how those dark urges
for power, money and violence can lead to miseries elsewhere in the
world.
If this idea was going to work it really needed
the full support of the musical and singing forces and there was much to
offer and impress on that front. Conductor André de Ridder perfectly
controlled the wide dynamic of the work allowing space for the drama to
work within it, but also insuring a wide spacial dynamic within and
outside the pit for the harp on one side and the booming percussion up
at the back of the other side of the stage. Paula Murrihy's Judith was
delivered with lyrical and dramatic conviction and Duke Bluebeard was
well characterised by Joshua Bloom. His warm timbre was underpinned by
a steely defiance that managed not only to be menacing, but seductive
and even loving, particularly when describing the qualities of his three
previous wives. The results were thrilling and chilling.
Links: Irish National Opera
Donnacha Dennehy - The Second Violinist
Wide Open Opera, Dublin - 2017
Ryan McAdams, Enda Walsh, Aaron Monaghan, Máire Flavin, Sharon Carty, Benedict Nelson, Alyssa Hefferman
O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin - 2 October 2017
The core elements from The Last Hotel, the first opera composed by Donnacha Dennehy with playwright and director Enda Walsh, are still in place in their second collaboration, The Second Violinist. The Crash Ensemble are still there to navigate through Dennehy's Irish trad-influenced rhythms; there's a small cast of three singers (two female and one male) and a male actor; even the subject plays on a similar theme of death and desperation. In most other respects however, The Second Violinist expands the range and ambition of both writer and composer, finely adjusting the balance of the various operatic components to create a fuller and more accomplished piece of music theatre.
In one respect there appears to be a simplification or at least a greater refinement and precision in this work's dramatic focus. The Second Violinist really all centres around one man; Martin is a musician, a second violinist (obviously) who appears to be on the verge of a breakdown. He's almost ready for a visit to the Last Hotel, by the looks of it. Like the Woman in that piece, Martin is bombarded by messages on his phone; he gets calls from a local drama group looking for incidental music for a production of 'An Ideal Husband'; constant promotional texts from a pizza company; and angry recriminations from Martin's colleagues who aren't too impressed with his lack of preparation at the last rehearsal.
There's a reason for Martin's distraction, and the reason for it eventually becomes clear - or sort of clearish in a complicated, twisty, mobius loop kind of way. Exasperated and visibly at the end of his tether, Martin finds that the apartment where he lives alone has been taken over by phantoms who act out what at first appears to be a fairly ordinary domestic scene. Married couple Matthew and Amy are having an informal evening with Amy's friend Hannah, having a few glasses of wine and a pizza, but as the evening continues, things go a little awry, causing Matthew to consider how well he really knows the woman he has been married to for four (or is it five?) years.
Martin meanwhile tries to pull his life together, trying his best to ignore this phantom scene that is playing out simultaneously in his apartment, but not managing terribly successfully. The fact that he hasn't screamed or killed anyone yet (as far as we know), means however that he must be just about holding it together. What is keeping him from falling apart is an unexpected phone chat exchange with Scarlett, a viola playing musician who also shares his love for the Italian Renaissance composer, Carlo Gesualdo. The outcome of the fatal social evening however is closing in on Martin at the same time as he is starting to see light at the end of the tunnel.
Without getting too clever and self-referential - since the work's overlapping time-split narrative structure is complicated enough - The Second Violinist looks at life as an opera. Not in the familiar sense of musically-heightened dramatic melodrama, but in the sense of someone - a musician - who is looking for something that will bring a sense of structure, purpose and meaning to his life and put it into some kind of context. Carlo Gesualdo's life and music are an inspiration in this respect (as it has been for other modern composers, notably Salvatore Sciarrino's Luci mie traditrici and George Benjamin's Written on Skin); a tumultuous life with bloodshed and violence that nonetheless gave birth to music of indescribable beauty and poetry.
The Second Violinist consequently places greater demands on the role that the Crash Ensemble have to play under the direction of Ryan McAdams. There are still hints of Irish traditional music underpinning the score, but less of a single rhythmic pulse and a greater variety of tone in a work that has a more complex fractured dynamic with overlapping, contrasting sentiments to convey. It demands a different kind of virtuosity that doesn't rely on individual musicianship as much as a close collaboration of a custom ensemble working together to create that complex shifting sound world.
That's particularly important here because The Second Violinist is much more reliant on instrumental musical expression working with the dramatic narrative than the virtuosity of vocal expression that was rather more conventionally used in The Last Hotel. Sharon Carty, Benedict Nelson and Máire Flavin all handle their individual lyrical pieces well (less abstract than the pieces in The Last Hotel) and a chorus extend the chamber arrangements of the work considerably, but since we are viewing everything through the perspective of Martin, it would seem appropriate that it's Martin's view of life as an opera that is expressed mainly through the music, as well as in the silent intense performance of perpetual motion that actor Aaron Monaghan brings to the main role.
The superb set designs by Jamie Vartan and Enda Walsh's direction are just as vital to the expression and kinetic momentum that is established between the musical performance and the drama. As well as having two levels (woods/apartment) to represent different layers of Martin's psyche, the opera makes good widescreen CinemaScope use of the stage, where multiple events happen at the once or in quick succession but the focus of attention is always clear. The use of projections are also effective, with text messages and phone apps representing another important layer of everyday 'reality' that we can all recognise, not just Martin. Death, when it comes, does not bring the kind of dramatic resolution that we are accustomed to find in an opera; life and how we cope with it, as The Second Violinist shows in a fast and furious 75 minutes, is much more complicated than that.
Links: The Second Violinist, Wide Open Opera, Dublin Theatre Festival
Donnacha Dennehy - The Last Hotel
Wide Open Opera, Dublin - 2015
Alan Pierson, André de Ridder, Enda Walsh, Robin Adams, Claudia Boyle, Katherine Manley, Mikel Murfi
Sky Arts, 2016
The concept and playing out of the first opera by Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh is what you might call situational; which is why it's called The Last Hotel, I guess. It involves only three characters who come to a run-down and quite sinister hotel with some rather unsettling if somewhat vague intentions, plus one non-singing character, a demonic hotel porter.
Sinister and demonic are perhaps the key words here, as there's little that you'll find common or inviting as you try to figure out who these people are, what has brought them together and what they are doing at the hotel. There is very much a 'huis clos' kind of feel to a situation that is quite divorced from any kind of realism, and you do indeed even wonder if the Last Hotel is indeed some kind of waiting room for the after-life where these characters have met up in death.
As it happens, no-one has died yet, or at least none of the three principal characters; I can't say anything for sure about the existential state of the demonic porter who is seen rapidly cleaning up the blood from the last guests, but it's clear that death is not far away. As the Woman introduces herself and makes small-talk conversation about the journey over to the hotel with the Man and his Wife, we find out that death is very much on the agenda.
The exchanges and the interior monologues that each of the three of them express are however rather vague and poetically impressionistic. All of them however are rather nervous, a little bit panicky about what is to take place, and all of them are trying to put a brave face on what they are about to participate in. A rehearsal is proposed and it becomes apparent that the Man and his Wife have agreed to come to the hotel to help the Woman end her life. For reasons that are similarly unclear, but edgily urgent...
If there is an edgy urgency to the situation and a sinister and demonic aspect to what is to transpire, it's conveyed primarily by the driving propulsion of Donnacha Dennehy's distinctive music score. Performed by the terrific Crash Ensemble, Dennehy's music has the percussive energetic chug of Michael Nyman, but supplemented with flute, accordion and electric guitar it is underpinned by a structure and rhythm that has all the cadences, repetitive loops and shifts of Irish traditional music.
It's the music that gives the otherwise fairly obscure and poetic reverie of Enda Walsh's libretto its essential character. The three characters do interact, but it's mostly nervous small-talk that skirts around the purpose of their being at the hotel. They do break out or rather slip inward into more reflective consideration of their condition, but there are no specifics that reveal anything about the circumstances that have brought them together at this point. If it comes together at all, it's very much down to the music keeping up a tone and a momentum.
If the words don't carry much in the way of information or insight, there is at least some expression of character and situation in the writing for the voice. It's a surprisingly lyrical piece and not as recitative heavy as you might expect a contemporary English-language opera to be. Again, I think much of this has to do with the Irish music rhythms that align lyrically to the voice, and the urgent continuity of those rhythms and the tensions that are generated inevitably pushes the voices into the higher registers.
Premiered at the Edinburgh festival, Wide Open Opera's The Last Hotel also ran at the 2015 Dublin Theatre Festival (Dennehy's second opera with Enda Walsh The Second Violinist will feature there in the 2017 festival) and it was filmed there at the O'Reilly Theatre for Sky Arts. Originally conducted by André de Ridder, Alan Pierson takes over the direction of the 12-piece Crash Ensemble for the filmed performance.
The film version retains the minimal sets of the stage production for the live performance, but includes filmed cut-aways in and around a hotel when the focus turns on the individuals having their 'moments', giving the opera a little more room to expand outwards without losing any of its intensity. The intensity of the work and the kind of challenges of the singing are taken up well by the cast, with Claudia Boyle the Woman, Robin Adams the Man and Katherine Manley his Wife.
It took a week to get B*Witched's C'est la Vie out of my head.
Links: The Last Hotel, Wide Open Opera
