THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Based on the book by Maggie Nelson, adapted by Margaret Perry; directed by Katie Mitchell
Jerwood Theatre Downstairs Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London SW1W 8AS until June 29, 2024
"Blue is a mysterious color, hue of illness and nobility, the rarest color in nature. It is the color of ambiguous depth, of the heavens and of the abyss at once; blue is the color of the shadow side, the tint of the marvelous and the inexplicable, of desire, of knowledge, of the blue movie, of blue talk, of raw meat and rare steak, of melancholy and the unexpected (once in a blue moon, out of the blue)."
That is the opening to the 'blue' section of Alexander Theroux's unique gem of a book The Primary Colors (1994). That sentence alone has more erudition and insight into the color blue than this fussy and muddled 80 minute dirge of a 'play' which is attempting something similar.
Theroux explored the artistic, literary, emotional, religious, linguistic, botanical, scientific and culinary aspects of Blue. This production is the story of a person possessed by a lifelong obsession with the color, but sadly it sinks to the depths under the weight of what has been added, an all too familiar wallow in exploring what it terms the "subjective experience of pain". We're back in A Little Life territory where "pain" is the get out of jail free card for bad art.
Nelson's original text (neither a play, a novel, nor an essay, apparently) has many admirers and Perry's feat in adapting it must be commended. Three actors play B (Emma D'Arcy), C (Kayla Meikle) and A (Ben Whishaw) - three thought strands, one obsessive, one depressive and one determined to distract, inside a woman's mind as she tries to live with and recover from heartbreak and grief. The text is split across five movements as if it's a piece of music and we hear the characters' thoughts split across the three performers as we watch them play her, living out her life. She goes to work, tries to be a friend, tries to keep her mind busy and the blues at bay, and so she turns to music, art, philosophy, and science for company in her pain. So, we get fragments of the work of Joni Mitchell, Andy Warhol, Billie Holiday etc. and even Derek Jarman's great film, Blue. This Blue, in one section, is inspired by the famous memoir The Sexual Life of Catherine M. Note: despite the presence of Ben Whishaw this is not one for the Paddington Bear audience!
Katie Mitchell has been the Resident Director of the major theaters in Berlin, Hamburg, Amsterdam and at the Aix-en-Provence festival, where she is generally venerated. Her productions are always challenging (not a bad thing) but always Marmite for audiences too. Over many years she has perfected 'Live Cinema' where productions are made in a rehearsal room equipped with all the scenery and the final technology including the essential video elements, to fashion a complete mixed media experience. She has inspired many theater creators. The excellent programme book here includes fascinating essays by the assistant directors Ellis Buckle and Aneesha Srinivasan and the sound designer Paul Clark on the technical complexity of all this, which is great to understand, but in the end the theater must be about moving the audience in one way or another, and on this score it fails.
The three actors are crunched into a very small space at the front of the stage, hemmed in by cameras (obscuring the view for many), mics and screens, some of which serve as backdrops, leaving the vast upstage empty. They stage close ups of body parts or key props or move in front of video-projected exteriors, but they struggle to bring out any humanity, as their space for physical expression is so limited. It's like watching a filmmaker painstakingly film close ups. The only key plot strand about the protagonists paralyzed friend, too, ends up feeling tokenistic. The pain, whatever its source, isn't sufficiently explained and so not dramatically earned.
This marks the welcome arrival of David Byrne as the new Artistic Director at the Royal Court and his program for the year looks very promising. This is a shaky start however, and I'm not sure how it qualifies as new writing as it was already staged in Hamburg. In short, this is one for the Katie Mitchell completists.
