Blue Beard Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh 13th March 2024 Review
Blue Beard by writer/director Emma Rice is at the Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh until 30 March. In this production, however, this dark and murderous folk-tale is given a modern update and a new twist as Emma Rice blends two stories together with music and song.
Initially the opening of this work is confusing with the women in this story assembling to do mundane things before the real story starts. Are they Bluebeard’s ex-wives? No, they are the FFF sisterhood, women of some strange order with a martial arts twist complete with a venerable and mysterious master with a blue beard who often talks in a strange far eastern accent that I thought we had left long ago in the dim past of 1970s comedy shows. Apparently not. To make matters worse, the comedy dialogue is all too often simply not funny. The latter may have been me though as people around me were finding some of it hilarious.
As you would expect from an Emma Rice script though, all is not as it seems and we are not where we think we are, but to tell you the truth would be a big spoiler for the end of this show, so I will say nothing more about this.
In this contemporary take on Blue Beard, he is a modern day magician and Tristan Sturrock is both charming, threatening and disturbing in this role, just as you would expect such a character to be in real-life, and the one instruction that he makes of his new wife Lucky (Robyn Sinclair) on his departure not to open the door, proves of course an irresistible temptation instead. Of course Blue Beard knows this as why else would he leave the key to the room in the first place. This time though, the new wife and her mother (Mirabelle Gremaud) and sister Trouble (Stephanie Hockley) have a surprise in store for Blue Beard.
This for me is where the cohesion of this work starts to unravel as the story of this trio and their characters are strong enough not to need to be in Blue Beard’s world at all. Again though, all is not as it seems. What is real though are the talents of all three performers and Mirabelle Gremaud is a good violinist.
The second story here, that of brother and sister (Adam Mirksy and Mirabelle Gremaud) is again strong enough to stand on its own but like our trio in Blue Beard it never gets the time it really deserves to explore the story or its characters fully and together both stories at times become confusing and weaken each other. This story, however, is the really important one in this production, so stay with it as the clues to what is really happening only start to become clearer in the second Act.
Katy Owen will be a surprise to many people in this production and again I have no intention of spoiling that surprise for anyone who still plans to go and see this show, but it is Katy’s character who is the real key to unlocking the many doors in Blue Beard’s castle.
These stories are working on many levels, and there are some very dark scenes in Act 1 which are strangely glossed over swiftly with humour. Both interweaving stories have one dark theme, violence against women by men, but below that surface is an even larger and equally dark topic. Just how does someone deal with the catastrophic loss of losing someone close and very special to them? How do they deal with the conflicting emotions of their own anger and guilt, and what world will their mind retreat into to try and make some sense of what has just happened? Can someone find their way out of this dark space without a helping hand from someone? So many questions are raised in this work, but all too many times where it looks like there is the opportunity of an exploration of what terror and grief can do to a person we seem to go down blind alleys and never come out the other side of them. Partly this is due to forced humour in the wrong places. In the right places though, there is at times very understated and very good music and lyrics interwoven into this production of Blue Beard.
Review by Tom King © 2024
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
Initially the opening of this work is confusing with the women in this story assembling to do mundane things before the real story starts. Are they Bluebeard’s ex-wives? No, they are the FFF sisterhood, women of some strange order with a martial arts twist complete with a venerable and mysterious master with a blue beard who often talks in a strange far eastern accent that I thought we had left long ago in the dim past of 1970s comedy shows. Apparently not. To make matters worse, the comedy dialogue is all too often simply not funny. The latter may have been me though as people around me were finding some of it hilarious.
As you would expect from an Emma Rice script though, all is not as it seems and we are not where we think we are, but to tell you the truth would be a big spoiler for the end of this show, so I will say nothing more about this.
In this contemporary take on Blue Beard, he is a modern day magician and Tristan Sturrock is both charming, threatening and disturbing in this role, just as you would expect such a character to be in real-life, and the one instruction that he makes of his new wife Lucky (Robyn Sinclair) on his departure not to open the door, proves of course an irresistible temptation instead. Of course Blue Beard knows this as why else would he leave the key to the room in the first place. This time though, the new wife and her mother (Mirabelle Gremaud) and sister Trouble (Stephanie Hockley) have a surprise in store for Blue Beard.
This for me is where the cohesion of this work starts to unravel as the story of this trio and their characters are strong enough not to need to be in Blue Beard’s world at all. Again though, all is not as it seems. What is real though are the talents of all three performers and Mirabelle Gremaud is a good violinist.
The second story here, that of brother and sister (Adam Mirksy and Mirabelle Gremaud) is again strong enough to stand on its own but like our trio in Blue Beard it never gets the time it really deserves to explore the story or its characters fully and together both stories at times become confusing and weaken each other. This story, however, is the really important one in this production, so stay with it as the clues to what is really happening only start to become clearer in the second Act.
Katy Owen will be a surprise to many people in this production and again I have no intention of spoiling that surprise for anyone who still plans to go and see this show, but it is Katy’s character who is the real key to unlocking the many doors in Blue Beard’s castle.
These stories are working on many levels, and there are some very dark scenes in Act 1 which are strangely glossed over swiftly with humour. Both interweaving stories have one dark theme, violence against women by men, but below that surface is an even larger and equally dark topic. Just how does someone deal with the catastrophic loss of losing someone close and very special to them? How do they deal with the conflicting emotions of their own anger and guilt, and what world will their mind retreat into to try and make some sense of what has just happened? Can someone find their way out of this dark space without a helping hand from someone? So many questions are raised in this work, but all too many times where it looks like there is the opportunity of an exploration of what terror and grief can do to a person we seem to go down blind alleys and never come out the other side of them. Partly this is due to forced humour in the wrong places. In the right places though, there is at times very understated and very good music and lyrics interwoven into this production of Blue Beard.
Review by Tom King © 2024
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com