Wise Children’s Blue Beard at Theatre Royal Bath and on tour – review

In her programme notes, Emma Rice states that she has always disliked the story of Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard, as it arguably glamourises the charming, swaggering serial killer of wives over the female victims who fall under his dangerous spell. So, for her latest show for her company Wise Children, she reclaims it. Whether this is fully successful is a matter of perspective, for many in the auditorium last night, particularly the large groups of schoolchildren, there was a flood of energy that suggested Rice had hit her target flush. Others may feel that it was made up of several glorious set pieces that don’t fully cohere into a satisfying whole.

Rice’s theatre can feel like a jigsaw set; individual pieces that can fit together perfectly but sometimes feel like a piece is missing. In Blue Beard, it is more like one edge has frayed off. As always, Rice – here credited as an individual author for the first time as well as director – enjoys playing around with form, three interweaving narratives that join in an ending that lands its gut-punch. We see the sisterhood of the fearful, f**ked, and furious, led by Katy Owen’s Mother Superior who comes across Adam Mirsky’s young man and begins an exchange of stories with him, one about a dazzling magician with a closet full of grisly secrets and one about a brother and his musician sister who squabble and love each other in equal measure.

Each story has different energies, Owen dominating the narrative link with pier-side jokes and asides (though for those who have grown used to her patter as a Rice regular, she seems muted here until a late bloom of energy), while there is a melancholic air to the contemporary scenes that suggest the tragedy to come. But it’s the Blue Beard story that gets the significant stage time and incorporates most of Rice’s trademark theatre gold dust.

There is no unnamed female victim here, instead, we are introduced to Lucky (Robyn Sinclair) and her mother and sister, and Rice spends most of the first act letting us know them. She does this through some terrifically entertaining songs where Sinclair and her sister Trouble, given a spirited turn by Stephanie Hockley, get to belt out catchy toe-tappers that continue Stu Baker’s ability to bring hummable earworms to life. We get some literal magic as we see Lucky fall under her future husband’s charm as she volunteers to be sawn in half, a reminder about how popular culture has always fetishised violence inflicted upon women.

Yet Tristan Sturrock, fine actor though he is, lacks the magnetism and dangerous allure that would make his Blue Beard a true monster. Yet maybe this is the point Rice is poking at, that it can be the most ordinary of men who can fade out the lives of the most extraordinary of women. She balances her ending well, a triumph of killer karma as three women band together to stop the threat of one of literature’s most famous women-killers but then shows us that the cycle continues again and again. “I should be able to walk home alone” stands shiveringly as a late epitaph, but Rice is an optimist and she ends it with her cast in a line, joining hands, agreeing to walk together.

It’s always a blessing seeing a Rice show. The jigsaw may not fully connect just yet, but there is enough magic sprinkled throughout and a long enough tour that you’d expect it to build in power and magic as it rolls along.