I quickly read Maggie Nelson’s memoir Bluets two weeks before seeing its stage adaptation. Like many others, I was amazed by Nelson’s exploration of depression and love but found the idea of adapting this text puzzling. Composed of singular paragraphs, without an overarching narrative or discernible characters to cling to, Bluets is a musing on the colour blue more closely related to poetry than theatre. My apprehensions towards the play were both proven and disproven, leaving me months later unsure of how to feel about it.

From May 17th to June 29th at The Royal Court Theatre, Bluets starred Ben Whishaw, Emma D’Arcy and Kayla Meikle as the same narrator, performing paragraphs from the original text. Each actor had a segment of the stage with a television behind them. A camera focused on them individually, while a projector displayed their performances on a large screen above. The televisions served as a makeshift form of rear projection, a filmmaking technique where acting occurs in front of pre-filmed scenes. This technique was distancing and entrancing simultaneously. Its uniquely experimental form is something like no other, but that distinctiveness doesn’t necessarily mean it worked. It was a feat in combining the two mediums, but I don’t believe Bluets was the correct text for it.

Even with the memoir fresh in my mind, it was difficult to digest what I was watching. This blockade between the audience and the stage appears from the aversion to narrative structure. It works brilliantly in the memoir, but it slumps on stage as the actors keep going, reading vague monologues with no end in sight. Without a story, the emotionality of the piece is lost, which is saddening to say, considering how much the book connected with me.

Bluets is a testament to the possibilities and limitations of adaptation. While the production captured the essence of Nelson’s prose, it struggled to maintain the intimate connection that makes the memoir so affecting. The combination of literature, theatre, and cinematic technology is ambitious and even admirable, but Nelson’s work resisted such a drastic transformation.

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