Bluets: an 'experimental and engrossing' production

The Royal Court's new artistic director, the playwright David Byrne, has launched his tenure with a production "so technically sophisticated that it leaves the head spinning, but so full of poetic feeling that it penetrates the heart", said Sarah Crompton on What's on Stage. 

Adapted from Maggie Nelson's book of prose poems, "Bluets" has been staged by director Katie Mitchell using her "live cinema" concept – a mix of live action and video screens. The result is an "experimental and engrossing" evening, which takes us inside the head of a woman who is heartbroken and unmoored, and obsessed with the colour blue – and whose consciousness is embodied on stage by three actors: Emma D'Arcy, Kayla Meikle and Ben Whishaw. "Bluets" "isn't always easy to fathom". But it's "stylish and full of wonder", and a "compelling portrait of sadness". 

The production is "clever, culturally aware, technologically adventurous and discombobulating", said Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard. The actors stand at workstations, kitted out with scripts, microphones, cameras and various props that are swapped in and out. It's highly complex – the actors must interact with recorded film played on screens behind and above them – but "flawlessly done". And though "always distinct", the trio do "generate a single identity through fragmented snapshots". This is "intense, static and pretty dense" theatre, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times – "more of a collage than a conventional drama. But it has its own cumulative beauty." 

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There are moments of "magic", said Dominic Maxwell in The Sunday Times. But though I was glad to have seen "Bluets", I was also "glad when it ended". The evening has a "sheen of proficiency", said Clive Davis in The Times, and the casting of Whishaw will help sell tickets. But it lacks the verve of Mitchell's hit "Little Scratch", which was a similar project. It's all too fragmentary and the actors are hemmed in by the demands of the video design. We've had a lot of cameras on stage lately. Maybe it's time for a break.

Royal Court Theatre, London SW1. Until 29 June