How do you capture a whole life in an evening? It’s a question for all biographical dramas, but especially so for Imitating the Dog’s new one-man show, whose protagonist led an extraordinarily incident-packed life. Eugene Bullard was a boxer, a jazz drummer, an entertainer, a businessman, one of the first African American fighter pilots – enough material for several shows. Rather than attempting to be comprehensive, All Blood Runs Red announces itself as a dérive: a loose stroll through Bullard’s life, with detours along the way into performer and co-writer Morgan Bailey’s own experiences as an actor in Paris, where Bullard made his name.
Bailey subscribes to Jean-Luc Godard’s belief that a story needs a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. Narrating his proposed movie version of Bullard’s life, he jumps back and forth in time, alighting on key moments before skipping onwards. It’s a knowing strategy that plays with the conventions of biopics and cites the vocabulary of film: cuts, closeups, exterior shots. In Tyrone Huggins’s production, this approach works well with Imitating the Dog’s trademark multimedia style, allowing for witty use of projections on to screens, objects and even Bailey’s body. The repeated film-making device of the whiteout, deployed in dramatic moments of Bullard’s life, becomes a striking metaphor for the whitewashing of history.
This is a complicated show with many moving parts and, when I see it, Bailey – an otherwise compelling stage presence – is still settling into the performance. All the narrative fast-forwarding and rewinding also means that we often blast past intriguing elements of Bullard’s biography, from spying missions to near-death experiences. The man himself remains shadowy, not quite reclaimed from the obscurity in which Bailey finds him. This is perhaps the point: we can never really know people from the past, even when cinema gives us the illusion of proximity. And yet the result is that the full complexity of the show’s subject always feels frustratingly out of reach in a performance that is full of big ideas but ultimately sacrifices depth for breadth.
• All Blood Runs Red is touring until 14 March.
