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.