The Seven Deadly Sins & Bluebeard’s Castle
Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires
A double bill of Kurt Weill's "The Seven Deadly Sins" and Béla Bartók's "Bluebeard's Castle" at Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, directed by Sophie Hunter. 

“Women and film are at the heart of these productions. The female protagonists are reimagined, now no longer the outright victims of the patriarchal world they inhabit but instead potential agents of its downfall. Film becomes one of the key modes of storytelling: from the fever dream of projected images in Bluebeard’s Castle to the magic lantern like landscape of celluloid dreams in Seven Deadly Sins.” 
– Sophie Hunter on The Seven Deadly Sins & Bluebeard’s Castle

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The Seven Deadly SinsA young woman crosses America on a roller coaster like ride through the landscape of the American dream. The production embraces the seething and excoriating satires of Brecht and Weill in all of their grotesque and seductive ways but also leans into the language of female political protest.

Huge black and white images of the female body are the scenographic backdrop. Each body part corresponding to a sin. This is the female body as surface, symbolically objectified in its fragmented and chopped up form. These surfaces are projected on to literally and metaphorically. They morph into the landscapes the Annas travel through and they are also animated into the very sins themselves. Visceral and vivid choreography reinstates the piece as “a sung ballet”. The dancers are at once the storytellers, the antagonists and extensions of our female protagonists.

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Bluebeard’s Castle
A circular stage, covered in earth, floats in the darkness. Another circular disc suspended above it. This is the arena in which the violent and hallucinatory cyclical dance of Bluebeard and Judith unfolds. Instead of seven doors there are seven marriage chests, partially buried under the stage of soil. The unearthing of each chest is the excavation of an aspect of Bluebeard’s psyche. As the chests are opened projections spill out, gradually covering the stage. Taking her cue from the film theory that Balazs went on to dedicate his life to, Hunter is working in the medium of film as dreams and the unconscious. This is a production shot through a Hitchcock lens of suspense. As they circle each other and the space fills with evanescent flumes of smoke we catch glimpses of ethereal limbs, drops of blood, a psychotropic garde and the exoskeletons of corsets.

This is a fever dream in its shared hallucinatory form. Judith is just as much the agent as Bluebeard. It leads inexorably to the tragic conclusion of their mutual obliteration, the existential crisis of the impossibility of two people ever truly connecting and the fulfilment of the female voiced prologue’s prophecy “Each one of us is alone in the end ....”.


“Risk-taking has arrived to the conservative opera season..this performance is the most avant-garde and daring of the year….Sophie Hunter, who, through her vision and stage directions, creates a truly excellent rendition of the opera.” – Clarín (Seven Deadly Sins & Bluebeard’s Castle, Teatro Colon)Hunter’s staging creates so much impact …an extraordinary production.” – Pagina 12 (Seven Deadly Sins & Bluebeard’s Castle, Teatro Colon)

“An impeccable production” – Pablo Kolan, La Nacion