Blue Beard – The Lyceum, Edinburgh
In the early 1400s, a French nobleman, Gilles de Rais, was found guilty of kidnapping, raping, torturing and murdering children. He got away with his heinous crimes for longer than he should due to high birth rate and fear, amongst the lower classes, of retribution, should they speak up.
This true story became the legend of Blue Beard and the children he murdered morphed into a series of murdered wives, whose mutilated bodies Blue Beard hid in the cellar. The fairy tale explores and warns of the perpetual fear, always in society, of abuse and cruelty forced upon the innocent and the weak.
Emma Rice has reworked this famous Bartók opera into a modern-day musical, balancing fresh, boozy, party-loving female confidence against the scales of ongoing malevolence towards specific, known, ...