Neil Murray's staging of Angela Carter's ripe reimagining of Bluebeard begins at the end, and with a startling image. The Marquis lies sprawled across the family piano in a feminine pose; passive, erotic and quite, quite dead. Carter was reading De Sade when she wrote The Bloody Chamber, and the erotic possibilities of pain and pleasure suffuse this violently sexual fairytale as the 17-year-old virgin bride is taken to her wealthy husband's remote castle, deflowered and makes a bloody discovery in an underground chamber. Carter's lush prose, well served by Bryony Lavery's adaptation, is moist with symbolism, and the girl's final escape is not just from the sadistic marquis and death, but from her masochistic self.
Sadly, Neil Murray's production never fulfils the promise of that first image, and before long it becomes foremost a demonstration that sex on stage is frequently a toe-curling embarrassment. There is a coyness here that owes little to Carter and a great deal to soft porn, a peculiarly English mixture of rose-tinted erotica and trousers around the ankles rumpy-pumpy.
There are some good ideas, such as the musical underscoring and the use of film to create the interior world of Carter's heroine. But the staging is often clumsy, and there is a fatal lack of rising tension, so that the bride's discovery is anticlimactic rather than shocking and revelatory. The acting is so-so, too, with Roisin Gallagher's sacrificial bride hinting less at a potential for corruption and more of a girl whose idea of a bedtime treat is a nice cup of cocoa.
