Less is more: an exhausting Seventies ‘masterpiece’ that could do with a cut
Bluebeard
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Sadler’s Wells, London EC1
The show that Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch has this week brought to Sadler’s Wells is the arrestingly – if also less-than-catchily – titled Bluebeard. While Listening to a Tape Recording of Béla Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.
It was created by the theatre pioneer Bausch (who died in 2009) way back in 1977, and is generally regarded as an early masterpiece, one of the main works with which she found her unique dance-theatre voice.
Stir in the fact that it has never before been performed on these shores, and that her still-surviving company – now under Bettina Wagner-bergelt – has not “danced” it at all for a quarter of a century, and small wonder its arrival here feels like something of an occasion.
The action takes place in a large white room, completely empty apart from the hundreds of dry, autumnal leaves strewn across it, an old-school reel-to-reel tape recorder and loudspeaker on a trolley, a wooden chair, and a man and a woman.
She is lying on the floor on her back, forearms pointing straight up, but otherwise as rigid as a wooden puppet. He, meanwhile, keeps restarting the titular Bartók opera on the machine and then climbing on top of her, whereupon, in what reads like a strange kind of parody of sexual intercourse, she pushes the two of them across the stage with her legs.
Before long, they’re joined by a forlorn crocodile of men and women in dark suits and evening dresses, as if all sloping home together from some party that went miserably wrong.
And all this plays out to (thanks to the man’s constant, neurotic returning to and fiddling with the tape recorder) the curious stop-start of Bartók’s one-act expressionist opera about Bluebeard. That (difficult, beautiful) opera is largely, as far as I can make out, about confronting the past and facing up to one’s demons, and Bausch’s piece takes a not-too-dissimilar line.
All the tropes that would become Bausch staples are present and correct: fraught, violent interpersonal relationships and sexual politics; no one seeming to communicate in any meaningful way with one another; people trapped in solipsisms of obsessive, repetitive behaviour; brief flashes of humour amid the gloom; lots of underwear. The main problem with the piece, though – for all the undeniably feral energy of the company’s performance – is that while it clearly wants to have a crescendoing, cumulative power, it’s all so one-note that the dominant sensation after its interval-free hour and 50 minutes is weariness, with a sense of having got the message way before its close.
Undeniably interesting as it is to see a modern master start to shine, and fun as it is to speculate just how bracing this piece must have looked in the Seventies, the fact is that Bausch would do far more powerful, playful and multifarious works later on.
Until tomorrow. Tickets: 020 7863 8000; sadlerswells.com