Bluets, Royal Court Theatre Review
Bluet Production Image. Photo by Camilla GreenwellWritten by Franco Milazzo for Theatre & Tonic
Disclaimer: Gifted tickets in exchange for an honest review.
This stage adaptation of Maggie Nelson's avant-garde 2009 poetry collection arrives with a starry cast of Ben Whishaw (James Bond, This Is Going To Hurt), Emma D’Arcy (House Of The Dragon) and Kayla Meikle (Marys Seacole). All are seasoned and exquisite actors so it something of a mystery why they chose this as their next project.
To cut to the chase: Bluets is something that comes with many frills but hardly any thrills. Many of those frills come care of Katie Mitchell’s vibrant direction. All her motifs are here. A distinctive set design sees the trio first chat backstage in full view of the audience before performing behind their own identical furniture sets of a table in front and a small screen behind them. There’s an intensive forward motion throughout with the pacing always kept at a steady roil but never, ever threatens to boil over. The acting is grounded in the words, embracing them but with not much in the way of direct emotion shown.
Margaret Perry has taken Nelson’s core text and blended the different narratives. Well, narratives of a sort as Bluets is far more about concepts than anything as fun and jolly as characters or plot. She throws in lofty mentions of philosophers and artists - Jarman, Wittgenstein, Goethe - and takes care to perk our interest with regular bursts of lusty sequences. Perry interweaves the head-spinning notion of feeling a deep attraction to blue objects with the earthy elongated fucking between two nameless individuals but, in her prosaic telling, neither part really raises so much as an eyebrow.
Mitchell never lets the actors stay still for too long and even their recital is broken up; lines are often interspersed so that the three say a few words each and they are rarely given more than a line to themselves. This spreading out of who says what has the consequence of removing gender from the storylines and gives a beige-like texture to the more sexual elements. Nelson (and, so, Perry) is too polite to give the characters much in the way of a physical description so we are left to ponder the idea of two faceless, formless beings going at it for hours before Perry moves the subject on to even more vague twiddlings.
The frankly dulling way the sometimes evocative poetry is delivered here seems outdated. Even though they are solo affairs with far less budget expended in the way of set design, Martha Watson Allpress’ Lady Dealer (currently at the Bush Theatre) and Richard Marsh’s Yippee Ki Yay are both richer affairs with the storytelling more fluid, the acting more engaging and the journey more fulfilling. Likewise, the heavy use of technology renders this starry cast near-redundant (should Bluets be revived, it is hard to believe that anyone of their international calibre will be required to grind this particular organ). Like other efforts which rely this much on screens - Kip William’s vivid take on The Picture Of Dorian Gray comes to mind - this production with its assembly line-like direction is something of a cyborg of a show which often struggles to make a human connection.
At Royal Court Theatre until 29 June.
☆ ☆
