The Thirteenth Child

About

Director Darko Tresnjak approached Poul Ruders’s 80-minute score as a tightly wound, suspenseful thriller, insisting that every moment in the terse libretto matters. The staging drops the audience into the action from the first bar and races through seven scenes, each presenting a fresh crisis. Scenic designer Alexander Dodge’s concept centers on a towering structure that evokes the dizzying perspective of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a physical manifestation of King Hjarne’s paranoid mind. Projection designer Aaron Rhyne’s mapping technology morphs and distorts this tower, enabling rapid transformations and flashes of terror and wonder. The castle interior wraps the stage and, under York Kennedy’s dark-blue lighting, becomes a canvas for serpents and other projected imagery. The result is a swift, cinematic production that matches the opera’s pace and psychological intensity.