Diary: Bluebeard, Blood and Bones

The rehearsals have begun with the story of 'Bluebeard' and the actors talking with Melly about their responses to this familiar but still horribly strange tale of a rich man dismissed as grotesque because of one feature that makes him different: his blue beard. But, of course, as we discover, he is truly grotesque and the story of the way he tests his new wife's fidelity rapidly unravels before coming, as so may of these tales do, to a bloody end. There is blood too, and lots of it, in another of the tales: 'The Juniper Tree'. Here a mother, possessed by the devil, kills her stepchild before chopping up his body and cooking the remains in a stew that she then feeds to her husband, the boy's father. "Somehow I feel this has got my name on it" he says, innocently tucking in to the remains of his son. As Elaine Claxton, the actor playing the stepmother, brought down a butcher's chopper onto the rehearsal table with a crack, pretending to cut through the bone of the dead child in order to put his remains in the stew, those of the cast not yet involved but watching intently, flinched.

This grizzly incident led to one of the first of many discussions about how to stage some of the more technically difficult parts of the performance. Melly wants the actor playing the father actually to eat the stew containing the "bones", but how to achieve this poses a potential health and safety challenge! The bones have to look realistic, not like plastic, and someone suggests they should be painted, but the Deputy Stage Manager points out that they can't be painted because the paint might come off in the stew (which must be warm) and harm the actor who has to eat it during every performance. Another complication also needs to be considered: the play requires that the bones from the stew are thrown onto the floor and so whatever material they are made from must be able to stand up to the very necessary hygienic precaution of being frequently washed in hot water before being used again.

These ancient stories obviously still have the power not only to cause problems for stage managers and actors, but they are also able to move and disturb an audience. They touch on taboo subjects: murder, rape, incest, child-abuse, and infanticide. It isn't all Grimm, occasionally they are humorous and good-natured, sometimes they are wickedly satirical, but then, suddenly and unexpectedly, they turn deadly serious, brutal and tragic. Like dreams, or nightmares, they obey few of the laws of the conscious world, moving instead through the murky sub-conscious, embracing the fantastic and bizarre alongside the realistic and mundane. They are the raw material of theatre that bites.