Blue Heart

by Caryl Churchill

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 14 November 2016

Blue Heart, directed by David Mercatali, consists of two short plays, Heart's Desire and Blue Kettle. Each is daringly experimental, yet each reveals the tensions and deceptions lurking behind ordinary and plausible situations.

In Heart's Desire Brian (Andy de la Tour), his wife Alice (Amelda Brown), his (or her) sister Maisie (Amanda Boxer) and his son Lewis (Alex Beckett) are awaiting the return of his daughter Susy (Mona Goodwin) from Australia. The scene plays out the final few minutes before the door rings to herald Susy's arrival, but disconcertingly the dialogue begins again and again with variations that reveal often wildly divergent outcomes. Sometimes there are outbursts of anger and rage, sometimes not, but the calmer versions are only gradually developed after the outbursts cause a blackout and a return to the beginning, or perhaps to the last point at which civility was apparent. It is a terrific ensemble piece as the three older adults in particular have to repeat themselves meticulously over twenty times. Occasionally, to add further technical difficulty, the familiar parts of the scene are speeded up as if fast-forwarding a tape (the play dates from 1997) - movements are jerky and the dialogue is reduced to odd words.

The structure allows all sorts of information about the family and its dynamics to be revealed even though we see only a small snapshot of their lives. One or two particularly brutal comments become part of what we might take to be the 'real' development, but it remains peculiarly disturbing that the flow of events is once interrupted by a gang of noisy school children, and once by masked terrorists who murder the family. Even Susy's arrival plays out in several different ways; in one version an Australian friend of hers turns up instead, and in another, an astonishing coup de theatre, a fanasticated emu prowls around the stage.

But the real denouement of the family reunion is left tantalisingly in doubt as the scene ends (twice) as Brian says to Susy "You are my heart's desire".

In Blue Kettle Derek (Alex Beckett) makes a habit of revealing himself as the long lost son of older women who have put out a baby for adoption. The situation is a bit creepy - at least his girlfriend Enid (Mona Goodwin) thinks so - but once again there is an opportunity for the awkward meeting of adult child and birth mother to be played out in different ways, with very different emotional overtones. However, the startling innovation is not the investigation of the scam, but rather the increasingly disruptive breakdown of language, as gradually more and more of the words spoken by all the characters are replaced, seemingly at random, by either the word "blue" or the word "kettle". Perhaps in parallel to the increasing complexity of Derek's position - he even allows himself to be introduced to the husband of one of the women, and later introduces two of them to each other (so each assumes the other is the adopting mother) - the actual words being spoken become masked by the two replacement words, and we have to guess from the context what might really have been said.

By the end, even "blue" and "kettle" can no longer be said, but only their initial consonants. Amazingly, as Derek breaks down in the face of the pain he has caused Mrs Plant (Amanda Boxer), these almost inarticulate sounds convey the slight hope of human sympathy reaching across the almost insuperable barriers we sometimes erect between ourselves.