The Bloody Chamber

Sometimes it’s not the acting of the cast, nor the quality of the script or even the expertise of the direction which makes a production, but the simplest of staging decisions. In this case the production is made by the decisions to play Chopin’s 'Nocturnes' and Beethoven’s 'Pathétique' live on stage and to have an almost unceasing soundtrack of the sea. This gives Kate Baiden’s adaptation of Angela Carter’s fairy story something of the lush evocativeness of the source material.

The Bloody Chamber is a re-working of French fabulist Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard legend, in which a mysterious Marquis marries a series of wives only to secretly dispatch them and lock up their bodies in a remote chamber of his castle.  

Baiden’s script works best when she does least, and she is wise enough to lift long sections of the heroine’s first person narration directly from Carter’s original. However her decision to downplay the role of the gun-toting mother, with which Carter so pointedly replaces the sword-wielding brothers of the Charles Perrault, seems a pity.

The central performance of Miranda Horn as the last of the doomed wives has a quiet musicality, although how well Jack Fairley’s rather baroque Bluebeard works next to Horn’s greater subtlety is a moot point. They produce some passages of effective physical theatre – their combative onstage love-making is especially well executed. Unfortunately the sensuous capital accumulated by such sequences is lost in the anti-climactic conclusion.