BAFFLING TRAGEDY
How, in the space of an hour, do you stage a modernised version of a French play by Racine based on a Greek original, concerning moral blackmail, revenge, murderous love and political intrigue, using just two characters? The answer is you can’t, but there was a vigorous if confusing effort to do it this week in What Put The Blood (Peacock, ★★, ended yesterday) The Scottish writer Frances Poet and the Abbey artistic director Graham McLaren gutted the Racine play down to the passions of the two main female roles, each of whom spoke in alternate monologues, each tethered to a chair wearing voluminous wedding gowns splattered with blood. They appeared to be confronting the audience with their stories and daring them to judge. In one sense, enough gutting hasn’t been done because the two women retain their Greek names while the male characters referred to were changed to Red, Shadow and Hammer, so that anyone who knew the original would take a while to work out who’s who and those who didn’t know it would be confused in a different way. Lucianne McEvoy was vivacious, varying between frustration, black humour, and barely concealed rage, while Julie Rodgers was an excellent resentful woman forced into a marriage to save her son’s life. Ultimately, despite fine performances and great detail in the staging, the play failed because hearing at second hand about people and complicated events you haven’t encountered in the flesh robbed the story of the immediacy necessary to land the killer punch you need in all tragedy.