​// Presented on an intimate scale for Cape Town Opera’s OPERA SHORTS series, in an English text arrangement by the director and with piano accompaniment by CTO musical director Jan Hugo. This production of Bluebeard’s Castle shifts focus from fairytale moralism to the grey area of human complexity— the duality that places us somewhere between guilt and innocence, darkness and light. Here, Bluebeard and Judith are not newlyweds but a long-married couple navigating memory, trauma, and loss. Two people are alone; the castle is not an architectural space but the fractured emotional life of the couple, the doors and walls their bodies, their memories. The piece examines the fragility of human connection and the risk of excavating our own secret rooms: what have we kept locked away and what do we risk revealing to ourselves when we grant access to another? A child delivers the spoken Prologue, asking what is real and what is only perception. Objects in bags, fragments of something forgotten are extracted as Judith journeys through the “seven doors”, where moments of clarity and exposure are blurred by her mind’s own dissociative defences. She is dissuaded and shielded by Bluebeard, who emerges as a fierce defender of her Fortress. Bluebeard is not a villain, but a partner urging Judith back from the brink- all the while plagued by the question of shared culpability. From Door 7 the other Judiths emerge: the child from the prologue, the younger Judith in the early stages of her relationship with Bluebeard, and Judith as an older woman. They are the wives Bluebeard has loved, all Judith, with her many facets and idiosyncrasies, in the ‘daybreak, noon and evening’ of her life. An additional sound world combines the Zulu lullaby ‘Thula Baba, thula sana’ with children’s voices, psychological evaluations and Bluebeard’s probing questions.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ As Judith, soprano Siphamandla Moyake delivers an intensely human portrait that transcends a mere portrayal of mental illness. Alongside her, William Berger is a deeply layered Bluebeard with a broad and complex emotional palette. //

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