Bluets by Margaret Perry based on the book by Maggie Nelson. The Royal Court Theatre, Jerwood Downstairs, Sloan Square, London SW1 to 29 June 2024.

3✩✩✩ Review: William Russell.

“An impressive if occasionally baffling start for the new regime.”

A woman is obsessing about the man who abandoned her for someone else. She is also grieving for a friend paralysed in a road accident and sees the colour blue as dominating, defining her life, herself as a bit like the Bower Bird which collects objects, mostly blue, to decorate its nest. She too collects things blue. Maggie Nelson’s novel does not spring to mind as something which would adapt to the stage but Margaret Perry has reformed it and director Katie Mitchell has staged the result in something called Live Cinema, a method she has used before. What we get are three static cameras. Behind each is a desk on which are various props the players will use. Behind each player is a video screen on which scenes are shown – a street perhaps, the interior of a car, an underground station. What the players do – often with objects on their desks, a glass for instance, is filmed by the three cameras and shown against the back ground of their small screen on a large cinema screen which towers over the stage. It is technically amazing and the skill the backstage staff display ensuring that all the props necessary, be it a change of clothes, the driver’s mirror of a car or the pole somebody holds on to while travelling by tube, is there at exactly the right moment is breath-taking. But from the stalls that big screen, which one has to watch to see the play, is at quite the wrong angle/ An awful lot of twisting one’s neck trying to see what is on it and what the three actors, who scurry in between each other’s space as the action requires, are up to. It might all work better from the circle where your gaze would be looking at the cinema screen face on. However the three actors do everything required of them and manage to create believable persons rather than a director’s puppets, with Emma D’Arcy coming over best. As the initial production under David Byrne, the Court’s new artistic director it is certainly a sign that what is to come is going to be exciting and different. Ben Whishaw, the man, Emma D’Arcy, the woman obsessing about her lost love and the colour blue, and Kayla Meikle, the other woman manage to do what is usually considered as acting in between all the activities required of them to create the picture on that screen. The marriage between actors and film, pioneered by Mitchell, is becoming something of a habit these days – Opening Night, Sunset Boulevard and Romeo and Juliet have recently all to some extent indulged in the camera taking the audiences to places unexpected and to illuminate performances. Mitchell certainly knows how to do it. Byrne promises risk and adventure with the new regime and this puzzling, complicated, expertly performed adaptation of Maggie Nelson’s novel fulfils that even if it is at times rather baffling, but then so is the novel.

Cast

Emma D’Arcy – B.

Kayla Meikle – C.

Ben Whishaw – B.

Creatives

Director – Katie Mitchell.

Designer – Akex Eales.

Video Director – Grant Gee.

Lighting Designer – Anthony Doran.

Music & Sound Designer – Paul Clark.

Video Designer – Ellie Thompson.

Stage Manager – Greg Shimmin.