“Bitte, bitte,” urged attendants at the Theater Basel, pressing earplugs into the hands of audience members there to see the Swiss premiere of Turner Prize-winning, Glasgow-born artist Douglas Gordon and composer Philip Venables’s Bound to Hurt. While it may seem counter-intuitive to distribute earplugs before what is essentially a contemporary opera, they turned out to be a most welcome piece of kit. The plot deals with domestic violence, and at times the soundtrack was loud enough to rumble seats. Jarring, spliced versions of pop classics such as I Feel Love and Can’t Take My Eyes Off You were performed by an onstage band that featured a musician who pounded his luridly lit drum with impressive right hooks. Empty wine bottles and tangled Christmas lights littered the stage—a landscape into which the performer Ruth Rosenfeld crawled, memorialising a broken relationship (the other half of whom is probably the lifeless figure under a sheet at stage left). “Remember the time we went to Brian’s party and you were like so drunk you threw up all over Archie?” she asks. “That was funny, wasn’t it?” Gordon is a student of violence but aside from the volume, the opera is fairly restrained. The most constant refrain is the sound of Rosenfeld knocking over empty wine bottles, which is amplified by a nearby microphone. Before Thursday’s performance, Gordon could be seen pouring an entire bottle of red wine onto the stage. For verisimilitude? No. “It’s a kind of blessing,” he explained.
