Emma Rice’s retelling of this bloody folktale could be described as Blue Beard: The Cabaret. It is a characteristically eccentric affair, with song, movement and oodles of theatrical pizzazz. The ancient story of a man who murders his wives and keeps them in a locked chamber is flamboyantly, cheekily updated with pop culture references (from Lady Gaga to Jamie Oliver). Rice’s writing feels unruly but who cares when it is so charming? Magnificently mischievous, the show is staged as a musical (composed by Stu Barker), morphing into a full-on gig before reshaping itself to a more spine-chilling form.
Serial husband Blue Beard (Tristan Sturrock) is a svelte, sinister magician in a burgundy suit, wooing his bride, Lucky (Robyn Sinclair), by sawing her in half before his rapt audience. Little does Lucky know it is a sign of things to come. After they are married, his magic key reveals that she has disobeyed him by straying into a locked chamber, and discovering the dead bodies of all his former wives.
There are no rescuing brothers here, as in the original tale. Lucky is saved from becoming yet another dead wife by her sister (Stephanie Hockley) and mother (Patrycja Kujawska). The show bears revisionist elements of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (Rice’s company, Wise Children, was named after one of Carter’s novels, after all).
Rice adds an arch order of sisters from the Convent of the Three Fs (“fearful, fucked and furious”) who are led by a blue-bearded Mother Superior (Katy Owen) and seem like a Tarantino-esque version of Sister Act, alongside another subplot about a brother (Adam Mirsky) searching for his sister (Mirabelle Gremaud).
When the folktale comes to its exhilarating end – the slo-mo violence set to musical thunder-claps and a twirling glitterball – the real life aspects of this drama join up with the fiction of the Blue Beard story. If it sounds complicated, it is, but shocking revelations cohere, with as similarly startling a twist as in Lucy Kirkwood’s Maryland. It draws our mind to the necessity, sometimes, of retreating into fantasy or myth for the powerless and the grieving, whose realities are simply too abject to face.
Blue Beard’s tale becomes an urgent story of male violence against women for our times. When we are told he has a “deep, dark, blue rage bubbling in his blood” it chills with the resonance of domestic violence and coercive control. At first it all seems too literal, too unsubtle – a screen descends, there is CCTV footage, a character steps out of costume – but the power is undeniable. It leaves you absolutely struck with horror.
This transposition is well thought through rather than bolted on: one theory suggests that the figure in Perrault’s fairytale was based on a real 15th-century killer, Gilles de Rais. A line is drawn from Rice’s magician to Sarah Everard and all the other lost sisters across time.
At Theatre Royal Bath until 10 February. Then touring until 18 May.
