Blue Beard
York Theatre Royal

ANYONE who’s seen a previous Emma Rice production will know what to expect from Blue Beard: bawdy humour, music hall, and emotional heft. These are all characteristics she shares with Angela Carter, whose work she admires so much she named her theatre company after her 1991 novel Wise Children. 

The biggest surprise is, perhaps, that it’s taken her so long to adapt Charles Perrault’s gruesome folktale, which Carter notably updated in classic feminist short story The Bloody Chamber. Rice leans into this revisionist angle in a way her hero would doubtless approve in this co-production with Birmingham Rep, HOME Manchester, Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, and York Theatre Royal.

It’s a characteristically unruly, exhilarating show that lures the audience into false security with mischievous jokes aimed at everyone from Jamie Oliver to Claire from Steps. 

A musical of sorts, with compositions by Stu Barker, it introduces two sub-plots before Blue Beard even appears. These threads are held together by a martial-arts trained order of sisters from the Convent of the Three Fs (“fearful, fucked and furious!”), whose blue-bearded Mother Superior (a fierce Katy Owen) wastes no time in self-defence when a Lost Brother (Adam Mirsky) turns up looking for his Lost Sister (Mirabelle Gremaud).

These strands cohesively and intelligently interweave with the story of Blue Beard (Tristan Sturrock), a charming if sinister and narcissistic magician. He woos Lucky (Robyn Sinclair) by sawing her in half, and then kills his glamorous assistant in a trick gone wrong. These are red flags she ignores until, after they’re married, his forbidden key reveals that she disobeyed him and entered a locked chamber that’s full of the dead bodies of his former wives. 

Even then, she chooses to disregard the pleas of her sister Trouble (Stephanie Hockley) and mother (Patrycja Kujawska) to flee the house (“he loves me; I’m safe here”). This dark twist into domestic violence and coercive behaviour is handled with black humour, especially in an intoxicating slo-mo scene when the women act in solidarity to kill Blue Beard, the action set to Simon Baker’s sound effects and spinning glitterball.

Yet despite the humour, the seed of real-life horror has been planted and takes a sickening grip when CCTV footage shows Lost Sister being followed by a man on a dark walk home. This draws a line from Blue Beard to Sarah Everard, Sabina Nessa, and all the other women through history lost to male violence. In its depiction of female solidarity to overcome aggressors, it also makes a desperate call for action. As Mother Superior exhorts at the end of this utterly compelling and necessary show, “It’s time to wake the fuck up.”

Runs until March 9, then on tour until May 18. For more information see: wisechildrendigital.com