Karen Blixen: baroness, plantation owner, game-hunter and prolific, passionate writer. The late Danish author, who was immortalised on screen by Meryl Streep in the Oscar-winning film Out of Africa, gets her own stage play in the Riotous Company’s Out of Blixen. It’s a lateral portrait, focusing on four of Blixen’s stories, rather than a profile of the woman herself. It’s also an act of myth-making – do we acquaint ourselves intimately with Blixen through her stories, or do we misunderstand her because of them?
The ensemble of four, led by Kathryn Hunter, strives to draw a visceral connection between Blixen’s literary output and the woman herself. Blending folklore, a taste of the gothic and sharp social commentary, Blixen’s stories are fables for the 20th century, each one confounding and profound. But in adapting them to the stage, the rich textures and knots have been smoothed over, leaving us with sketches and summaries and a handful of potent images – but many more forgettable ones.
In The Sailor-Boy’s Tale, a coming-of-age narrative with a murderous twist and a surprisingly redemptive ending, the highly physical cast revels in the story’s obvious but striking imagery with everything from aerial silks and stilts to knives and bloody gloves. Composer Nikola Kodjabashia’s live accompaniment, on piano and assorted objects, is charming and beautifully scored.
But it’s the complex tales that trip them up, such as The Diver, where Blixen splices two very different stories together, moving from angels and birds to a talking cowfish; or Sorrow-Acre, a story set in the 18th century about a peasant mother making a sacrifice for her son that is also a dissection of the tension between liberal, democratic values and feudal, aristocratic ones. Here, the otherwise playful, energetic ensemble – including Complicite co-founder Marcello Magni – struggles, ending up stuck between whimsy and pathos.
An elderly Blixen, played by Hunter, wanders through the stories, introducing herself in anecdotes about the deaths of her lovers, a cancelled appointment with Hitler, and the syphilis her husband gave her, but little else. Hunter is, as ever, a magnetic performer, but watching these tales on stage doesn’t flesh out the enigmatic, deliberately eccentric woman who wrote them. In fact, they seem to reduce her to a handful of themes: femininity, purity, sacrifice, redemption. The stories may be vivid and sharp on the page but they are lost in translation here. This version of Blixen feels little more than a patchwork of a pithy quotes, a ghost of the woman she was.
• At Print Room at the Coronet, London, until 22 April. Box office: 020-3642 6606.
