Bloody Chamber a fascinating story lost in translation Alison Whyte in The Bloody Chamber. Picture: Jeff Busby Source: TheAustralian AS a piece of visual and aural theatre, The Bloody Chamber is magnificent, an austere banquet. It's boldly set (Anna Cordingley), brilliantly scored (David Chisholm, more Bernard "Psycho" Herrmann than Bartok) and imaginatively directed. But as a piece of narrative theatre, of simple storytelling, it's puzzlingly and fatally inferior to its source material. It's a vector reduced to a single point, a journey to its final destination. It takes a sensual novelette of 16,500 words and turns it into a 90 minute spoiler. Part of the joy of a first encounter with Angela Carter's story is that the reader doesn't immediately know that The Bloody Chamber is a re-telling of the Bluebeard folktale. Carter's unnamed narrator is the Duke's fourth bride, a rather willing 17 year-old, and the forward-looking narrative begins on the night of her wedding. It's a sensuous and perceptive story of a young woman signing up to a relationship with a much older and thrice-widowed man. Throughout the story, she fingers her own desire for corruption as if it were a fresh bruise. Her desire fascinates her. And us. This Malthouse Theatre staging - directed by Matthew Lutton with a performance text by Van Badham - is told by the now-adult woman. And the gore - beautifully handled, it must be said - is there from the start. As a backward-looking epilogue, The Bloody Chamber becomes a lifeless, bloodless, desiccated thing; nuance is ground to dust and free will is turned to determinism. The various changes to the original text are almost all bad or tin-eared. The word amniotic is cut from Carter's "I smelled the amniotic salinity of the ocean," reducing a richly evocative metaphor - we think of water spirits and the membrane of the surface of the sea - to something banal and tautological. Badham's added "unassailable cenotaph" sounds right, but cenotaph is a word Carter didn't use. And would not have used without qualification. It means empty tomb, which Bluebeard's castle most certainly is not. Even changing the ermine and sable-slashed fur coat to basic black is doltish. Worst of all, Lutton's production dials up the contrast. The bride's virginal innocence and vulnerability are exaggerated, as are the wolfishness and sleaze of the Baudelaire-quoting groom. She becomes boring and he becomes opaque. In the age of Dexter, we can cope with a bit of Romantic complexity in our serial killers, surely. And the dumbing down of an Angela Carter heroine is inexcusable. Alison Whyte gives voice to both the wounded, knowing bride and to Bluebeard. Hers is a well-paced and carefully pitched performance, brilliantly sustained, but she's let down by the material. The Bloody Chamber By Angela Carter. Presented by Malthouse Theatre. Merlyn Theatre, Melbourne, August 6. Duration: 90 minutes, no interval.