Bluets – Royal Court, London

Writer: Maggie Nelson

Adaptor: Margaret Perry

Director: Katie Mitchell

Only Katie Mitchell could have pulled off a theatrical adaptation of Bluets, a book about depression and the colour blue. In many ways, it’s vintage Mitchell, using cameras and projection in what she calls Live Cinema, first realised so successfully in her take on Virginia Woolf’s Waves at the National Theatre in 2006. Technology may have improved since then, but Mitchell still insists her actors work hard to produce gorgeous images of desolation and heartbreak on the overhead screen.

There’s a sly reference to the death of Woolf in Bluets too. The three narrators (Emma D’Arcy, Kayla Meikle and Ben Whishaw) claim that an obsession with the colour blue makes you want to fill your pockets with stones and find the nearest river. Meikle, dejected, stands in front of a closeup of the Thames while Whishaw (as wistful as his last name sounds) contemplates the river from Vauxhall Bridge. D’Arcy, with tear-stained eyes, pretends to walk along the Embankment. The result is both dramatic and cinematic.

Steering wheels and windscreen mirrors appear out of nowhere as the narrators, all the same person, a woman in the book, drive across the city, cut with sorrow after the end of a relationship. As a form of self-care, they lean into their love of the colour blue and small blue things: gemstones, a block of dye, a bottle of ink. But the pursuit of the colour becomes an illness in itself.

Seeing blue everywhere, they nurture their depression as to recover would mean that they have forsaken the ex-lover, moved on, become a different person. This selfishness is contrasted with their friend in hospital who has real life-and-death issues. However, this compassionate friend also recognises that the narrator’s mental state is just as urgent and tangible.

At the start of this 80-minute show, it’s hard to settle into the story as you are forced to admire the way the cameras catch the actors drinking shots of bourbon or resting their heads on tables as if they are sleepless in bed. But soon, a rhythm sets in mirrored by the repetitions of the text adapted by Margaret Perry, and the story enfolds incredibly before our eyes, the urban scenes the perfect environment for such loneliness.

The narrator seeks out how other writers like Derek Jarman, Goethe and Wittgenstein have approached blue. Of course, Jarman’s last film, Blue, was just a screen of the colour, while voiceovers charted his blindness and impending death caused by AIDS-related illnesses. Occasionally, the screen in Bluets appears to be exactly the same shade of blue, cold, yet hopeful.

If this all sounds desperately sad – and it is – there are slithers of wry humour, expertly delivered by Meikle, about a self-help book that deals in platitudes that the narrator still ends up buying. But apart from these asides, the three actors capture the blues in all its weary tones. Placing their collection of blue objects on the window sill, they watch the blue seep out.

Runs until 29 June 2024