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Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp.
Royal Court Theatre, London
IN EACH of these four short pieces, Caryl Churchill suggests that myth, fairy tale, religion and Shakespeare are all just narratives we choose to believe in — or not.
In opener Glass, a girl befriends a boy whose father is abusive. Their friendship allows him to escape but leaves Rebekah Murrell’s poignantly played Glass Girl fractured and broken.
Kill has the gods retelling and distilling the stories of the House of Atreus, boiling them down into an absurd and horrific violent essence, while in Bluebeard’s Friends, four dinner-party guests express their disbelief that their great friend, Bluebeard, can have murdered multiple wives.
“He’s full of stories,” exclaims Deborah Findlay’s Dot as she sits in a chair in Imp, the final and longest piece. Next to her there’s a glass bottle that may, or may not, contain an imp. Her cousin Jimmy (Toby Jones) runs ever-increasing distances to stave off depression and tells Shakespeare stories like they’re his mates’ personal anecdotes.
While Dot seems to believe that her bottled-up imp will grant her wishes, her harmless old-lady exterior belies an unsettlingly violent temper.
Walking the complex line between humour and tragedy, James McDonald’s cast perform with incredible precision. Findlay is exquisite, as is Jones, while in Imp Louisa Harland does a remarkable job in telling us as much with her anxious smiles as with her repeated refrain of “I’m frightened.” Her brief turn as an ornament dog in Glass is brilliantly comic.”
Churchill is at her most politically explicit in Bluebeard’s Friends, which offers such disbelieving deflections about MeToo perpetrators as “he played the piano so beautifully.”
But Churchill asks bigger, more philosophical questions about the differences between faith, myth and stories, our propensity to insert ourselves into traumatic narratives and why so many are structured by violence.
Like the great myths and fairy tales she draws on, what Churchill does in Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp. is create a breathtaking depth of meaning from the deceptively simple.
Runs until October 12, box office: royalcourttheatre.com
