Billed as “a gothic folktale in four-part harmony”, cabaret outfit the Ruby Dolls reimagine Bluebeard with a little help from Beyoncé, David Bowie, Amy Winehouse, Rage Against the Machine and their own songwriting skills.
Angela Carter’s famous feminist version is also very much to the fore in a 75-minute show that melds cabaret and storytelling to examine male coercion and violence and female agency, but always with a light touch.
This Bluebeard is never glimpsed, only heard speaking in increasingly sinister Fee-fi-fo-fum-style rhyming couplets that clearly set up the infantilised relationship with his new wife, a capable journalist who nonetheless yearns to be saved but ends up having to save herself. There is something of the vampire in him in the way that he has survived his previous wives who hail from many different eras, and it neatly makes the point that these kinds of abusive relationship are not new and how women – even modern women – fall prey to them. The fact that he is voiced by the show’s male director offers jokey food for thought.
The singing, particularly the harmonising, is always hugely enjoyable but the storytelling is sometimes less certain, although there is something rather satisfying about the way that the murderous husband is felled by a female stereotype – the singing siren who lures men to their deaths. It’s an evening that invokes monsters and makes mock of them.
- At Camden People’s theatre until 25 September. Box office: 020-7419 4841. Then touring to 22 October.
