A cold shaft of reality is expertly manoeuvred into place and then thrust forward mercilessly in the latest work from master of whimsy Emma Rice and her Wise Children company.
‘Blue Beard’ is, of course, Rice’s adaptation of the enduring French folktale about a young woman who marries the titular aristocrat and moves into his castle, only to discover that he has brutally murdered his many ex-wives.
Saying that the bulk of ‘Blue Beard’ plays out exactly how you’d expect an Emma Rice show to play out is definitely underselling one of our greatest directors. Nonetheless, there’s no denying the woman has her hallmarks. The dreamlike, song-drenched show – with music by Stu Barker – is framed by the Convent of the three Fs, a group of ‘fearful, fucked and furious’ women headed by Katy Owen’s hysterically bolshy Mother Superior, who for reasons we only discover at the very end is wearing her own blue beard.
She is very, very amusing as she makes a series of bizarre admin announcements re: her order (who seem to be the returned spirits of Bluebeard’s victims) while terrorising Adam Mirsky‘s hapless young man. He has turned up at the convent wanting to tell the Mother Superior a story about his older sister (Mirabelle Gremaud); she tolerates it in fits and starts but is mostly concerned with her own account of sisters Lucky (Robyn Sinclair) and Trouble (Stephanie Hockley) whose annoyingly virtuous sounding dad died recently, leading to them falling under the sway of Tristan Sturrock’s Svengali-like Bluebeard.
It has been long established that Rice is very, very good at the whole feminist fairytale thing, unparalleled at using inventive bathos, wild irreverence and female-recentring of traditional narratives to subvert and rewire the source material: Sturrock’s Bluebeard is less a darkly romantic figure than a bit of a creep. And where traditionally he is overthrown by his newest wife’s brothers, here it’s Lucky’s mum and sister that ride to her (very satisfying, very violent) rescue.
The cast are superb: long term Rice foil Owens’s ability to wholly commit to the more eccentric moments in her director’s work means scene stealing is virtually built into her performances. But Mirabelle Gremaud feels like the breakout star here: she has such a remarkable set of skills she feels like something out of a fairytale herself, playing harp and electric bass, busting out a load of circus moves and acting up a storm in a smattering of roles including the young man’s brittle older sister.
What makes the outcome of that story all the more powerful is that it occurs outside of Rice’s world: the show’s most horrifying scene happens shortly after the resolution of the Bluebeard storyline, when screens play monochrome faux CCTV footage of Gremaud walking through a British town centre at night.
It’s a horrible moment, but I think Rice takes considerable care to make sure we see it coming: it’s shocking but not crass. What Rice really smartly does is critique her own work. How effective – even responsible – is feminist subversion of classic stories if it’s all just artifice? Was the main story fantasy? Delusion? Does it threaten to distrract us forget the truth? Obviously this isn’t her renouncing her body of work. But the acknowledgement that art won’t stop men from murdering women is a bracing corrective to what is, in essence, an extremely pleasurable couple of hours of Emma Rice doing what she does best.