Oluwaseun Olayiwola

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Blue Correspondents

Bluets, Maggie Nelson, adapted for the stage by Margaret Perry, directed by Katie Mitchell, June 2023, Royal Court Theatre.
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Actual true story: Late February and for no decipherable reason, I’d started to flick through my shelves, pontificating on which authors I had read that had acquired a big enough audience to solicit a glitzy film deal. Let me say this: a writer needs whatever late-winter literary engagement he can muster to briefly absolve him of his seasonal affective disorder (SAD).

Initially, I’d thought of Marlon James’ Dark Star Trilogy, sexy queer fantasy novels set in precolonial Africa, two of which are published at the time of writing. Or, perhaps Ta-Nehisi Coates (the intellectual successor to Baldwin, according to Toni Morrison, to whom we must allow this declaratory authority) could lobby some Oprah money to develop whatever he wanted. Speaking of Baldwin, there’s a biopic in the pipeline, set to star Billy Porter, which has various communities (queer, activist, black, etc.) in understandable befuddlement and dissent. Porter is a Zionist, while Baldwin’s ethics were Pro-Palestinian. Harumph, harumph – my exploration must have ended something like that, sending this inquiry into the cosmic background of my head; the SAD, like a dutiful and lugubrious black liquid, filling in, reclaiming the newly divested lobe.

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Soon after, on X, The Royal Court announced their 2024-25 season, under the direction of new artistic director David Byrne. At the front of the season was an adaptation of the book Bluets by Maggie Nelson, her 2009 opus-not-opus that meditates on the colour blue: from personal emotional maladies to the Tuareg of the Saharan Desert, from the male satin bowerbird to Isaac Newton, Goethe to Wittgenstein to Yves Klein and on and on – a mighty collage in which every nuance gets a turn to coruscate.

The text was to be adapted by writer Margaret Perry and directed by Katie Mitchell. I dispassionately say ‘text’, because, as with much of Nelson’s work, Bluets is not only formally contentious, this sustained contention is its mystical power: is it lyric essay? Is it prose poetry? Philosophy? Colour theory? Memoir?

Like many poets, I expressed glee at this new adaptation. C’est vrai! I thought, then, Oh God, before steadily oscillating between those two exclamations in turn.

The oscillation was a premature nausea at what I imagined would be a difficult adaptation process. How was this plotless book going to sit on stage, and engage an audience for more than 30 minutes? Bluets is the kind of book that is pushed into one’s hands or recommended by a friend. Or at least it was before The Argonauts was published in 2015, which launched Nelson into international acclaim and saw the republication of her backlist. It’s a freak, little Frankenstein reading experience. It’s also the only book of Nelson’s oeuvre that she, perhaps in jest, considers perfect. As someone who has consumed nearly all of the books she’s written (including her PhD thesis, which became Women, The New York School, And Other True Abstractions), all podcasts available on the internet – whether she’s the interviewer or interviewee – and even made a dance film in response to Bluets himself, I feel able to say with confidence, Bluets, if not perfect, is asymptotically near. How would they adapt it? What could live performance add?

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The stage starts like this: partitioned into three stations, each adorned with a desk, a music stand, whisky, pub glasses, and a camera pointing into the available stage space. Clutter is a word that comes to mind. At the back of each sector, there is a small TV hung on the wall, and above those three, one massive blue screen, idle, plugged in, waiting for action to fill it. One can divine that mediatisation will not be an add-on, but a mode. But what pricks me is not the laboratory feel of the stage, not its visual loudness, but the actors backstage, sitting in a tungsten-orange light, clad in denim, who chat and laugh in a kind of pre-show cool, even as the audience has been seated for two or three minutes. The actors are Ben Whishaw (the voice of Paddington Bear), Kayla Meikle and Emma D’arcy (the actor responsible for the viral video where, in response to being asked what their drink of choice is, they say in a raspily composed and deliberately slow manner: Negroni… Sbagliato… with prosecco in it.) A stage manager, donning all black, approaches the trio and, briskly, almost militantly, they vacate their pre-show personas, march to their corresponding sections, throw down their scripts and begin.

What transpires is a 70-minute long live cinema experience: the actors’ movements, line deliveries, costumes, are all ‘designed for the filming process, determining exactly where [they] stand and how they act the scenes.’ The three cameras live feed to the large screen in the back, though not every feed is visible simultaneously. A video director live controls and cuts which of them appears on the big screen.

Each actor represents a section of the main speaker’s consciousness (named ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’): one is depressive, one obsessive, the last, distracting. Under these parameters, the character who is actualised is a moody, French Noir-esque anti-heroine; a wavering academic who drifts and drives though London, smoking cigarettes, having sex-laden night terrors; a carer whose friend has been in a bad motorcycle accident, paralysing that friend from the neck down. This character is caught up in an affair with ‘the prince of blue’, a man who loves the main character and another woman ‘in completely different ways.’ And all this is flush against the grayscale cityscape that is London. One wonders how much blue tint it would take to truly change London’s monochromacy. ‘The real color of the universe… is light beige’, the speaker in the text is disheartened to discover, after finding solace in the falsity that the universe’s average colour might be a ‘pale turquoise’. The real colour of London is grey, and throughout the film we see University College London, the Tate Modern, dimly lit windingly narrow streets that, in my opinion, cannot quite ensconce the Americana of interstate driving with its vibrant billboards, dilapidated pick-up trucks, beautifully various and thriving flora.

Dizzying, indeed. And the incredulity that a 70-minute performance could contain this mass of subject matter mostly parallels what reading Bluets is like: 240 propositions that could be read in their entirety in two to three hours. But the play has a central artistic challenge (artistic ‘problem’ if I am being less generous). Art is a choice-making endeavour: this image over that one, this mood, this sound, this pace, etc. But Bluets’ strange endearing power is the unilateral treatment it gives the different fragments that constellate to form its narrative – narrative, as opposed to, say, plot. To be made into something dramatic the Bluets adaptation has the obligation of escalation, by which I mean, a hierarchy needs to be established, the hierarchy of events that, in this instance, we may colloquially call plot.

I say hierarchy because in Bluets (the adaptation), plot accretes, whereas in Bluets (the text), plot accumulates. Accretion blooms; accumulation, with or without discernment, collects. Another way to think of it is this: one couldn’t start in the middle of Bluets the adaptation, without a great loss of what has come before, whereas with Bluets the text, its proclivity towards the aleatory is part of the aesthetic allure: ‘I could have written half of these drunk or high, for instance, and half sober’, the text says, which also indicts the structure of the book as whole. It could have been sequenced drunk, high, or sober – we would never know. But also, why should we care? ‘Writing is, in fact,’ the text mentions, ‘an astonishing equalizer.’

Though it is questionable whether this methodological equanimity can be maintained in a live performance, the adaptation does so many things that satisfy. To see bodies acting the words of the text, its structures, makes one care. The actors move with an efficiency that highlights their outstanding physical and dramatic technique. Just under the layer of philosophical ambivalence is the musico-poetic invitation from the original Bluets, which Perry and Mitchell have skilfully divvied between the actors. For the most part, the rhythm and exaction of the spoken text is impressively controlled, and unrushed, whether it is a paragraph broken into sentences or, more challengingly, a sentence into its individual words. Images of lone heads cerebrating, of hospital rooms, of the speaker doing a Virginia Woolf-style suicide, of the speaker getting fucked, mesmerise. There is humour! And people laugh! Music and sound director Paul Clark’s mechanistic, forebodingly hazy soundscape glues one moment to the next. For all the shagginess of its visual form, from the actor’s remarkable ability to clip presence from scene to scene, to the visual grandeur of the stage’s concomitant nuts and bolts, it is a suave progression of circumstance and feeling.

And yet, something is off. Askew. The adaptation has simultaneity, but at times feels as though it lacks synthesis. The bigness, the swelling of the more saporous elements of the text (the affair, the friend’s quadriplegia) over the less theatrical elements (penetrating art and literary criticism, philosophical feigning) threaten the buoyancy, the captivating ambivalence that makes Bluets such a pleasurable, mystifying and enduring read. I’ll escalate: it is that ambivalent method that is the essence of Bluets, an ambivalence, to be clear, that is the same philosophical ambivalence (and catalysing energy) in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, on which the book heavily models itself. The adaptation attempts to represent the lush and riveting intertextuality that defines Nelson’s work. But we are left wanting, save for some periodic voice-overs that ungraciously separate, rather than seamlessly inculcate, critical theories into the audio-world of the film.

Then I ask myself: well, what is trying to be captured, if not that essence? I was engrossed by the shadow dances of the stage managers, dressed in a black meant to make them evanescent as they ripple in and out of view with pillows, cups, boards, tube piping. And all this, at the exact precise moments the actors needed them, athletic in their agility from station to station, while, of course, consolidating no import around their entrances and exits. I was struck by the yang of the stage managers to the yin of the main actors, and this balance typified what in the book is a perfectly wrought relation between the white space and the text. This was a third thing and was it purposeful or an accident? Who cares, I thought, letting the anti-choreography lure me into the production’s sway.

But it could not hold me at all moments. I felt personally disappointed when one of my favourite ambivalences was cut from the text. At a bookstore, the speaker encounters a book entitled The Deepest Blue, expecting a ‘chromatic treatise’, but then rebuffs the book after reading the subtitle ‘How Women Face and Overcome Depression.’ She places it back on the shelf and months later orders it anyway. ‘The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language’, one actor says, which then cuts to ‘That’s my depression talking. It’s not “me”.’ If you haven’t read the text, then you wouldn’t know that Nelson also says the book offers ‘some admittedly good advice’. Albeit, it’s a small editorial choice, but for me exemplifies how the adaptation must in some moments forsake ambivalence for unanimity; that the plot point – the speaker’s depression – remains palpable is primary.

‘It often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing,’ says the original text. Herein might lie the difficulty of heightening a plot from a text that thematises, and perhaps even perverts notions of plot (We’re told that Nelson once described this book as ‘heathen, hedonistic, and horny’). ‘I hope our adaptation can be somewhere to bring pain, and perhaps feel less alone in it,’ says Perry’s adaptation note in the programme. The pain, to be clear, was brought to the audience. But is summarising the book as about pain (‘Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is a book about pain’ says the first sentence of the adaptation note) true? Does that really ‘[access] the blue of it’? Well, ‘not exactly’.

I’d note that in discussions with friends who have not read the original text, these paranoias were not present. Part of the intrigue with a text like Bluets is that it is hard to decipher whether any of the propositions are ‘actual’ or not. The text floats within an unverifiable uncertainty and that flotation is the enactment of its metaphysical power. The live cinema, as the rich language is placed on bodies, somehow makes the events feel actual (and this speaks to the finesse of the creative production team). However, this somehow paradoxically detracts from the overall truth of the text. The text is a project of ‘or’ while live cinema is a project of ‘and then’.

After the theatre went dark, I felt mostly strange. Anxious too. How was I to render the polyphony of sensation I had just experienced? I started to scatter down notes of what I have discussed here, with friends, some in agreement, some not. To verify and perhaps change my feeling, I saw it again, three weeks later. But besides feeling as if the actors had really, at this point, sat into their roles, my thoughts calcified, this time coming on even stronger over a post-show hookah.

Perhaps I will end on what I came to when the post-show conversation exhausted itself. Proposition 174 says this:

Mallarmé might have felt otherwise. For Mallarmé, the perfect book was one whose pages have never been cut, their mystery forever preserved, like a bird’s folded wing, or a fan never opened.

I do not for one second wish Bluets was left alone, that its pages ‘[had] never been cut’. On the contrary, the concurrently thrilling and depressive energy of Bluets is a creative force that would, if it is taken on its terms, spark any artist into creative production, either in mimesis or down other, new paths. I have been there. This adaptation is a new path. And in this, I deeply identify with Margaret Perry and Katie Mitchell, who feel the urgency of this work, even as it was published 15 years ago: the urgency of a female narrator to be messily obsessed, to narrate her own maladaptations, nuances, her own tinted, muted joys that are for no one else. ‘We don’t get to choose whom or what we love, we just don’t get to choose.’ Like Perry and Mitchell, I am in helpless affinity with this book, in its blue field that splashes out and captures and captivates. We are in the game together, we are each other’s blue correspondents.
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Image credit: Camilla Greenwell
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Oluwaseun Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer and performer based in London. He has been published by The Guardian, The Poetry Review, the Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. His debut collection is forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Soft Skull Press (US). He lectures in dance at the Kingston School of Art.