It’s a bold move for the Royal Court’s new artistic director David Byrne to programme this show as the first on the main stage under his tenure: an adaptation of Maggie Nelson’s 2009 memoir-cum-philosophical-tract-cum-poetic treatise Bluets, which plants us in the mind of a heartbroken woman who falls in love with the colour blue. It’s dense and demanding, esoteric and plotless, full of references to Goethe and Catherine Millet and Derek Jarman and Heraclitus.
Then again, with Emma D’Arcy and Ben Whishaw in the cast and Katie Mitchell at the helm, it suddenly becomes a much more appealing proposition. Mitchell uses the Live Cinema approach she’s been developing for the past 20 years or so: actors stand in front of screens with moving backgrounds on them, and cameras film the actor plus background to make a kind of merged live film on an even bigger screen above.
