Notes on a scandal | 2 February 2017

Kids: who’d have them? Certainly no one who has ever been to the opera. If they’re not murdering you, they’re betraying you, defying orders or throwing themselves into the arms of the nearest unsuitable suitor. What happens when that suitor is a god, or — god forbid — their own brother or sister? Answers came on the back of two very different operatic postcards this week.

At the Barbican, bathtime gone bad. A claw-foot bath sits centre stage, a cold, white womb in which monstrous twins writhe in fleshy ecstasy. Backs arched, legs flexed into Priapic verticals, they coalesce the clenching pulse of orgasm and the surging agony of childbirth into a single, exquisitely choreographed moment.

Combine choreographer-provocateur Javier De Frutos with Les Enfants Terribles — Jean Cocteau’s curdled fairy tale of an orphaned brother and sister whose mutual love is contorted into something inadmissible — and things were always going to get uncomfortable.