Review: Bloodletting. Blood, Blood, Blood!

Is it going to become a tradition that the first proper Mermaids show of the semester is a student-written mystery drama with supernatural vibes about people trapped together in a small space in North America getting weird ideas about who should be alive and what they should be eating, with a lavish set, lavish use of fake blood, and equally lavish opportunity for theatre reviewers to embarrass themselves criticising people’s accents? Because I’m not complaining if it is! But next time more leeches please—I heard Bloodletting and thought this would be a chance for my favourite really cool weird worm things to shine but (spoilers!) there aren’t any. 

ID: Lila Patterson, and Ethel. Credit: Louise Anderbjörk.

As you walk in to Bloodletting and go to sit in Reviewers’ Corner of the Byre (tonight excitingly and unusually on the left side of the audience, and right next to Producer Turner Prewitt and Writer/Director Ami Melville (who, it must be noted, is our Editor-in-Chief (but did you really expect an unbiased theatre review in this town?))), you are struck by copious smoke machine usage and ominous red light on the most exciting Byre set I’ve seen. 

This is admittedly a low bar—the Byre stage is quite large to fill and Byre sets in this town are usually unconvincing no matter how nice the individual set pieces are, but Props/Set Designer Clara Curtis cleverly works to reduce the empty space. Screens and bookshelves with ominous candles and a cute animal skull on one side of the stage construct a smaller, highly detailed stage of a house's room, in which most of the action of the play takes place. The more dangerous outside world is represented with rows of fake corn, the bottoms of which are almost invariably covered in smoke, which works surprisingly well to disguise the fact that they’re on a big flat black stage, as well as to establish vibes. Lighting Tech Ava Pegg-Davies creates a cool dramatic shadow effect of the corn on the back wall using the cute little lights at the edge of the stage apron—the lighting is suitably dramatic throughout, with some well-timed flashing in the violent bits. Irrelevant to all of these things but extremely prominent in pride of place atop a bookshelf is a taxidermied creature resembling a large brown wombat, who I am told has been christened Ethel and was in fact once a badger.

ID: Lila Patterson and Elliott Reed. Credit: Louise Anderbjörk.

This play sort of tells the audience that it’s about motherhood, but since I am not a mother except to several knitted objects and do not feel that I really Get motherhood, I am instead going to say that it’s about boundaries. The characters are all divided into various opposed groups: there are the living and the dead, the three different families (Hale, Kittery, and Abbott), rural women wearing skirts and dresses and less rural women who can wear jeans, parents and children, gendered roles such as wife/woman/mother and husband, and the farmhouse and the cornfield. There are clearly defined, but permeable boundaries between these groups. The story takes place against an apocalyptic crop blight, which inflames tensions and progresses the plot along with the increasing ability of the Hales to perceive the dead characters. The various opposed groups and their breaking down complement the futile main goal of every character in the play: to try to divide themselves and the others into the categories of Good and Bad.

Everything centres around Elise Siddiqui’s Jenny Hale, an extremely stressed-out mother, obsessed with the role of mother and willing to do anything to keep her daughters alive and make them Good. She feels that she is a Bad mother, that she was Bad for giving birth to and raising Bad (because not normal) daughters and thereby ruining her one Good daughter, Margot. Margot, played by Lila Patterson, feels that she is Bad and is terrified of becoming Worse by accepting she might be similar in any way to her mother or her sisters. She freely goes out, unlike the other alive characters, to the cornfield to smoke and meets Elliot Reed’s safety-conscious and generally very nice but still a Bad boy Henry Kittery—a crossing of multiple boundaries which brings about the revelations which lead to the plot's climax. 

ID: Charley Beck, Heather Tiernan, and Buster van der Geest. Credit: Louise Anderbjörk.

The Hales are staying in the Kittery house, since Hannah Doran’s very well-acted arch-categoriser Emma Kittery has identified them as Good people who deserve food. Her husband, Buster Ratcliffe van der Geest’s Tom, obsessed with the purity of his land and crops, is more suspicious. I feel bad for Tom because he actually doesn’t do anything wrong except for being too obsessed with ideas of the nuclear family and marriage and himself as the American patriarch living off his precious pure land—though admittedly I would find him completely intolerable to live with. 

There are also ghosts in the house, Heather Tiernan’s Jack Abbott and Charley Beck’s Isabel Abbott, an impressively-covered-in-blood squabbling couple commentating on events and trying to get over their failure of a marriage. Isabel is extremely into Jenny (amazing queer ghost representation! The bury your gays trope can’t happen if the gays are already buried!) but unfortunately Jenny cannot perceive her in any way, and to make matters worse Isabel’s extremely biased and loving reassurances in response to Jenny’s genuinely quite moving soliloquies are completely immersed in the status quo language of Good and Bad, when what Jenny actually needs is change. So it’s all doomed! But isn’t that what tragedy’s about? Go and buy tickets for the second night.
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