Opera Australia, on March 1, unveiled its short Sydney season of Bluebeard’s Castle, as a #MeToo-era thriller. As associate director Priscilla Jackman explained to me in an interview, as our latest Parliament House scandals broke: ‘No opera could be more important at this moment.’ Jackman and the director, Andy Morton, have sought to put aside the misogynist ‘museum piece’ of 1918, and to reframe the story to confront 2021’s difficult subjects: sexual violence, consent, coercion, and victimhood. Indeed, they wanted to bring the violence they heard in Bartók’s music directly on to the stage.

Bass-baritone Daniel Sumegi (Bluebeard) and mezzo-soprano Carmen Topciu (Judith, his fourth wife) equalled the especial challenges of this new production. Carefully, even with some understatement, they reveal what lies behind the first four of the seven forbidding doors of the Castle, closely following the opera’s original dramatic constraints. The orchestra, skilfully slimmed down from Bartók’s large ensemble by conductor Andrea Molino to fit the inadequate pit of the Joan Sutherland Theatre, still conveys the Bartókian sense of menace as the blood-soaked secrets of Bluebeard’s torture chamber, armoury, and even the more radiant treasury and prolific garden are unfolded. It is, however, with the apparently innocent question of ‘Who waters the garden?’ that this Sydney Bluebeard turns to the more explicit on-stage violence denied to Budapest audiences in 1918.

Carmen Topciu as Judith in Bluebeard's Castle (Prudence Upton)

Moving towards the climactic fifth door, the Kingdom, Bluebeard initiates a slap, a Trumpian grope, and a couple of struggle sequences. Judith, by return, kicks him down the stairs and later stabs him. The directors have read Béla Balázs’s libretto and the music carefully, however; these actions still fit plausibly with their ambit. Both singers pull out their bigger musical stops, playing to Topciu’s magnificent soprano strength, while Sumegi (who will perform the role of Wotan in Opera Australia’s Ring cycle later this year) makes more of his hitherto under-exposed bass sonorities to reinforce the intimidatory side of Bluebeard’s character.

The following Lake of Tears scene was a highlight. The explicit new tensions of the Kingdom are maintained through shimmering lake effects and the masterly ‘silent, white, smooth and unearthly’ atmosphere, created by lighting designer, John Rayment. These devices further the expectation of Bluebeard’s surrender of the last door key to a freshly empowered Judith.

The opera’s final scene pushes way beyond the enigmatic ending conceived in 1918, where it is even unclear whether the three wives revealed behind this last door are alive or just living on in Bluebeard’s mind. For the libretto is still Bluebeard’s story. He reverently celebrates his beautiful former wives, before the reluctant Judith joins them as the fourth, and last: the Lady of the Night. Monday night’s stage action, however, told an altogether different story, of wives held hooded and in bondage, who are liberated thanks to Judith, and then mete out to Bluebeard his own abusive treatment, leaving him, presumably, dying. In a powerful new vision, all four wives leave the stifling castle, walking silhouetted towards the bright light of hope.

Daniel Sumegi as Bluebeard in Bluebeard's Castle (Prudence Upton)

The surge and repose of the ‘mystery play of the mind’ intended by the librettist Balázs has, in Morton’s and Jackman’s hands, become a thriller of escalating power right to the end. The very vividness of Bartók’s music, originally focused upon Bluebeard’s loneliness, effectively underscores this alternative on-stage ending. As Jackman states: ‘Bluebeard may finish the opera, but they [the directors] see the opera as Judith’s.’

Does this transformation from implicit to explicit, from mystery to thriller, have a price to pay? Well, yes, if you follow the precise yet subtle expression of the libretto, and the matching supple orchestral symphony, into which the two vocal parts fit like fingers in a glove. A parting of ways is evident during the final three scenes, particularly the last, between the violence on stage and the meaning of the words the two protagonists actually sing. Nowhere is this divergence more telling than in Bluebeard’s vignettes of his first former wives and the growing apprehensions of the fearful Judith at joining them.

The risk, evident on Monday night, is that this #MeToo thriller of 2021 removes the orchestra from its central musical role in progressing the drama. It becomes more a mood backing track to the stage action of this new adaptation. The orchestra is also the essential vehicle for portraying the third listed dramatis persona of Bartók’s opera, the Castle, which sighs, weeps, and perspires, and has its own personality (of which Bluebeard warns Judith to beware). The opera’s title is not just a location of the drama – it is the drama. There are good reasons why it was not entitled simply Bluebeard and Judith, as, for instance, with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Or, as in this Judith and Bluebeard production by Opera Australia.

And the masked audience’s reception of this première? Applause all round, but we older men looked worried.

Bluebeard’s Castle continues at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House, until 10 March 2021. Performance attended: March 1.