Review: Blue Heart, Tobacco Factory Theatres

When a writer sits down to create a story, they have multiple options open to them. This could happen – or that. And then maybe this – or that. Mapped out, it would create a vari-stranded tangle, an array of multiverses through which the writer selects a single path, the one that brings the reader or audience to the point the writer wants them to reach.

Except that in Heart’s Desire – one of the two Caryl Churchill one-act plays that make up Blue Heart – the playwright doesn’t select. Instead, she stops the action repeatedly and reruns it with a different choice, a fresh option which her characters could just as easily have taken. And so a short and simple scene of a middle-aged couple waiting for their daughter to return home from Australia extends over an hour, flittering along paths both obvious and surreal and culminating in the entrance of a most astoundingly life-like cassowary.

There’s plenty of audience laughter at the more surreal paths chosen – the aforementioned bird, the stage invaded by primary school children. The audience are thrown off balance so far that for some inexplicable reason the massacre of the entire family by balaclava-clad gunmen in one strand elicits hoots of hilarity. There is remarkable skill on the part of the actors to remember where in the ever-looping script they are. The end result is interesting – but more in the way that watching the outtakes and deleted scenes at the end of a DVD is, than as an evening of entertainment. It’s clever: but clever is not necessarily good.

The second half of the evening, Blue Kettle, is also clever. What starts as a tale of an adopted man encountering his birth mother for the first time gradually decays as more and more of the script is replaced with the words ‘kettle’ and ‘blue’. As a study into how adept humans are at filling in the blanks, Blue Kettle is interesting in the same way as those internet memes about how many letters you can jumble and people can still understand what you’ve written. Even when almost the entire script consists of mere syllable sounds, the sense still comes through.

But as a piece of theatre, it almost feels like a waste. Inside the increasingly fragmented script is a real play struggling to get out, a potentially engaging and emotionally rich story about a man who pretends to be the adopted child of several birth mothers. Sadly this story gets blotted out by the single intellectual device of the ‘word virus’.

Blue Heart is a playwright’s experiment, a writer playing with ideas around the nature of writing and language. Whilst it would make a diverting evening in the context of a theatre-focused event like Mayfest, it’s questionable whether it offers enough substance to occupy the main house at Tobacco Factory Theatres.

Blue Heart, a co-production between Tobacco Factory Theatres and the Orange Tree Theatre, runs at Tobacco Factory Theatres until Saturday, October 1 and then transfers to the Orange Tree Theatre from Thursday, October 13 to Saturday, November 19.