Writers: Frances Eva, Molly Goetzee and Emily Walling
Directors: Frances Eva and Molly Goetzee
Blood Bath, performed at the Lion & Unicorn as part of the Camden Fringe Festival, is a disturbing title for what is essentially a gently comic meditation on our relationship with various fabled figures from the sea. Before the play starts Molly Goetzee, in a slinky green dress and Botticelli curls, is wordlessly crooning into a microphone. She is, we realise, a Siren, that figure of oceanic seduction who can lure sailors to their death by the power of her singing.
But she’s on dry land. In fact, she’s at a party and has shut herself in the bathroom, taking up residence in the bath. The bathroom is where all the action takes place, a nicely imagined liminal space between land and sea. First to meet the Siren is another figure of legend, Rusalka played, by Maire McGovern. Rusalka is a type of beautiful but dangerous water nymph in Scandinavian folklore. In Dvorak’s telling of her tale, in his opera of the same name, Rusalka falls in love with a human prince and follows him to our world. But love comes at a cost: Rusalka condemns herself to a life of silence. Here, as imagined by Emily Walling, Molly Goetzee and Frances Eva, she is a figure taut with anxiety, or so it seems. Is she hiding something more sinister than this?
The Siren is worried she might be pregnant, trying to hide a pregnancy test from Rusalka. The test is positive, but who she’s got pregnant by is anybody’s guess. Meanwhile, a third mysterious woman drifts in and out of the bathroom, absorbed in her own private dance. This is the Selkie, the sea creature of Celtic mythology. Is she really a seal? Well, ‘seal-adjacent,’ explains the Selkie, Frances Eva. Someone has stolen her seal skin and it is imperative she finds it so she too can return to the sea.
The plot sweeps along surreally, with some nice music and dance along the way. The three sea creatures bond in the bathroom, only gradually revealing their dangerous side to one another.
Runs until 31 July 2024
Camden Fringe runs until 25 August 2024
