★★★★★
Five Stars
If drama is a means of escapism, seeking to transport us into another world or merely into another person’s experience, Bluebeard pulls it off by inserting the audience into the head of an old lady with Alzheimer’s, and also into the shoes of her two adult children. It is impossible to watch Bluebeard
without imagining that it is your parent on stage, and therein lies the play’s power.
In the same way that Mufasa’s death in The Lion King upsets children because parents at that age are our entire frame of reference, the idea of parents degenerating gradually has a similar effect on me now. The idea of sudden death is in a way less heart-breaking than the experiences of Michael Roderick (David) and Carla Kingham (Emily) as they visit their mother in a care home and have to convince themselves that her brief moments of lucidity make the cost of care, not to mention her discomfort, worth it.
The mother in question, Claire (Becky Banatvala) is passive and unresponsive, and gives faultless stares into middle distance. From the opening scene, the audience settled in for an examination of mental illness at very close quarters, with a clear dichotomy between the realistic Emily and the sentimental David.
However, the tragic moments in this play are actually relatively rare: instead of watching seventy minute of frustrating, stilted conversations taking place over armchairs and cups of tea, the playwright is given terrific freedom within the disjointed memories and visions of a lady with Alzheimer’s. We are led through Claire’s tempestuous youth and invited to examine the consequences of marriage for our grandmothers’ generation: the young Claire tells us, “The first choice my mother ever made was the last choice she ever made,” before she and her daughter go on to make similar mistakes.
The play has a cast of three and some initially disorienting scenes, and the obligatory students-being-children scenes we come to expect from student theatre. My initial criticism was that the scope of one lady’s mental illness was perhaps too narrow to give a very emotional play enough substance: however, an unobtrusive but thorough treatment of feminist issues and euthanasia gave the audience more than enough to think about.
The proportion of bitter to sweet is just right, with very British comic touches coming at choice moments, particularly from Roderick’s array of characters. Banatvala is a dream to watch – she switches seamlessly from impertinent schoolgirl to wry, world-weary single mother to engaged twenty-something and back to old lady. Her attention to detail makes a non-linear play completely comprehensible: we can ascertain her age after just a few seconds of dialogue, and Kingham supports her beautifully by gradually adding impressive depth to the apparently callous Emily. It is unusual to see a student production as entertaining, thought-provoking and polished.
