Over the past few years, Cape Town Opera has been on a mission: to make sure that no-one who loves music can say, “Opera is not for me!”
Their 2025 season has been curated to provide variety, depth, novelty and, yes, a few familiar favourites. There is Gabriel Fauré’s haunting Requiem, performed with the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, at the Toringkerk in Paarl over Easter. Then it’s a run of Verdi’s Aida in May (with the full treatment, short of bringing elephants onstage). June and July will see the return of the Opera Blocks programme for young children, while in August, a production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute will play especially for school learners.
Also in August, Rossini’s Barber of Seville will be at the Theatre on the Bay, before the site-specific work Opus Reimagined at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in September. The company will round out the year with a gala concert to raise funds for its Duet Endowment Trust, followed by a return run of the David Kramer musical Orpheus McAdoo at Artscape.
It all starts, however, with an initiative that many audience members will find the most appealing of all: Shorts, a festival of one-hour “pocket operas” at the Wave Theatre in March. This unusual, experimental format has allowed for the staging of a selection of less well-known works that promise to shake up audience assumptions about the operatic form.
Fred Abrahamse and Marcel Meyer will direct Triptych: Women at War, three musical tableaux that draw on a range of traditions and subject matter — from Norse sagas to the American Civil War and European high modernism. Jacki Job directs Atlas of Remote Islands, an adaptation of Judith Schalansky’s obscure but beautiful German book (published in 2009). A double-bill from UCT Opera includes Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben and Leoš Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared, two pieces that extend the festival programme’s emerging themes of lyrical longing, reckless love, loss and grief. There will also be two workshop-style events, “Staging Stories”, at which audiences are encouraged to give their input on works in development.
The piece that most piqued my interest, however, is a new version of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s one-act opera, Bluebeard’s Castle. It tells a dark tale. The wealthy old lord, Bluebeard, brings his young wife, Judith, to his castle, which is full of locked doors and secrets. Judith insists on opening the doors to learn more about her husband, despite his reluctance, until eventually a final (seventh) door reveals Bluebeard’s previous wives, who are somehow trapped within the castle walls. Have they been murdered, and are these their ghosts?
Drawing on the gruesome fairy tale popularised in the seventeenth century by Frenchman Charles Perrault — precursor to the Brothers Grimm — Bluebeard’s Castle was composed in 1911 and first performed in 1918. Bartók’s only opera, with a libretto by the poet and early film writer Béla Balázs, has grown something of a cult following for what seems to be its psychoanalytic symbolism. Beneath the surface story of a wicked old misogynist trying to mend his ways and an overly-curious ingénue lies a parable about repressed memories, unconscious desires and unspoken fears.
The task of bringing Bluebeard’s Castle to life on stage at the Wave falls to Victoria Stevens, an SA director based at the Mannheim National Theatre. I had the opportunity of talking to Stevens in between rehearsals and was inspired by her take on the opera.
“There is rich mythical and Freudian terrain to navigate in Bluebeard’s Castle,” she notes, “but it needs some updating. I like to interrogate historical texts; to understand the context of the original but to regard it with some scepticism, with the eyes of 2025. I’m not interested in fetishising the suffering of a young woman and then celebrating her transcendence or immortality through art.”
Although SA’s epidemic of gender-based violence and femicide might invite a directly antagonistic or subversive response to an opera like Bluebeard’s Castle, Stevens is hesitant about being too reductive in pursuing sociopolitical relevance. “It would be an opportunity lost if we simply present the image of a raging wife-killer,” she adds, explaining that her interpretation of the work will place Bluebeard and Judith on a more equal footing.
This adaptation reimagines them as an older couple who are processing some kind of trauma. The setting becomes, instead “Judith’s castle: her mind, her fortress, her body”. As in the original, there are moments of clarity and moments of confusion that accompany each revelation, each door opened into the past. The cast is exploring different scenarios in rehearsal: infidelity, the death of a child or even simply the slow but painful creep of age.
Stevens aims to “harness something from inside” each performer she collaborates with — a different starting point to many opera directors, because she seeks psychological realism ahead of spectacle in her stagecraft. She approaches opera from a theatrical and dramatic perspective first, preferring the term “singing actors” to the more common (but also potentially polarising) “opera singers”. Stevens points out that the slippage between the words oper and musiktheater in German suggests how, in opera, “the drama and the music are inextricable from one another”.
Her own formation as a singer tracks a journey from her honours degree in classical music at the University of Cape Town to a Masters in opera performance at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and a second Masters degree, in stage direction and dramaturgy, from the Verona Opera Academy. After various appearances as a soprano, she shifted her focus to directing, with a plethora of productions to her name in Italy, the UK, the Netherlands and Germany.
Most recently, she directed Verdi’s Otello at the Staatstheater in Mainz. I am overly enthusiastic about the subject, so we spend far too long talking about Shakespearean operas, the dubious history of blackface performance, and the difficulty of bringing insights from SA discourses about race to bear on European operatic conventions and expectations. Stevens adds that she takes pleasure in creating within the confines of opera’s form and structure — but that she also likes to work “against the grain” of the western canon.
It turns out that her Otello is not unrelated to Bluebeard’s Castle, because applying a “colour-conscious” (as opposed to “colourblind”) view of the cast — with William Berger as Bluebeard and Siphamandla Moyake as Judith — enables an additional layer to their relationship by imagining them as an interracial couple.
Stevens is thriving in the Shorts format. “We tend to see opera as melodramatic, large-scale, with all these heightened gestures. It can be intimidating and alienating,” she admits, recalling the experiences she had working as a young professional that helped her to see “what, for me, opera is not: it should not just be a touristic experience or a pageant”. Increasingly, she has found herself drawn to telling, through opera, not just “tragic, epic or heroic” stories but also “the small stories, the mundane, the domestic”.
Bluebeard’s Castle is an excellent opportunity for Stevens to pursue this vision, and in the process to help Cape Town Opera find new audiences.
• ‘Shorts: A Festival of Pocket Operas’ is at the Wave Theatre, 44 Long Street, from March 7-16.
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