Bluets will not be everyone’s cup of tea. It is not a traditional stage play. It is a multi-modal technological marvel. It exists somewhere in a largely unexplored realm lying between live TV, art-house cinema and theatre. It is the uncategorisable sum of an unfathomable number of parts, brought together with split-second sharp choreography, on-the-fly video editing, and a uniqueness of vision that genuinely has to be experienced to be comprehended.

The premise: a woman reflects on grief through a passionate, and perhaps pathological, fixation with the colour blue. Three facets of her psyche, played by Emma D’Arcy, Kayla Meikle and Ben Whishaw, guide us through this 80-minute, interval-free meditation on psychological disfunction.

Imagine a live-staging of a radio play, only it’s not radio. The three actors perform on stage beneath a cinema screen. Their every movement, utterance and blink captured live by cameras and projected onto the screen; monitors behind them provide scenic backdrops. Flickering LED lights mimic passing cars, streetlamps, traffic lights. Live editing colourizes the feed to the big screen. Everything is in close-up. So we watch actors performing simultaneously for us and for the camera, and we feel like we are watching the filming of a movie in real-time. It puts us into the middle of somebody else’s out-of-body experience. Right in the middle and right up close. It is like nothing else I’ve seen.

And it is genius, I think. I did not know the book before watching the production, but it makes me want to go straight out and read it. In no small part because its adapter, Margaret Perry, explains in her programme notes her adaptation substantially reworks the source material, omitting much of it and reforming what remained. I wonder how she envisaged this production in Maggie Nelson’s genre-defying 2009 work.

D’Arcy, Meikle and Whishaw are supremely reliable, at home in front of the cameras and dodging the ever-present, vital stage-hands who keep everything functioning with their swift provision and removal of props. D’Arcy, particularly, captures a blank, empty despair in her portrayal of B, embodying a resignation to their condition that our protagonist seem to embrace. If there is anything to be said critically of the production, it is that the notion these three actors represent clearly distinct facets of our protagonist’s psyche is perhaps lost in the scripting, where single sentences are split up and shared between them. It is difficult to distinguish, say, obsession from depression right there, in the moment. But that does not detract from the unique brilliance of what has been achieved here.

Now, Bluets won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But even if you think it won’t be yours, you should go and see it anyway. You might well be wrong. If I’d known beforehand (I went, after a busy few weeks, without having done any research) that this was a multi-modal piece of theatre-craft with layers of technology resulting in one literally not knowing what to focus one’s attention on, I probably wouldn’t have gone. I’d have dismissed it as weird and unnecessarily complex, hybridising a world – theatre – that didn’t need to be hybridised. How wrong I would have been. For Bluets is the best thing I’ve seen on stage this year. And its ground-breaking mash-up of traditional stage skills and technological wizardry is worthy of sincere admiration, not scorn. It’s definitely brilliant. It might just be revolutionary.

Review by Daniel Bennett

Bluets is on at the Royal Court Theatre until the 29th June. You can find out more and book tickets here.

If you like this review you might also like my review for Two Strangers Carry A Cake Across New York, Choir of Man and Witness for the Prosecution.