Blue Beard
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
