Blue Heart

photo by Donald Cooper

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Director Max Stafford-Clark

Designer Julian McGowan

Lighting Johanna Town

Sound Paul Arditti

Original cast:

Gabrielle Blunt, Jacqueline Defferary, Karina Fernandez, Bernard Gallagher, Valerie Lilley, Mary Macleod, Eve Pearce, Jason Watkins, Anna Wing

World Premiere: 14 August 1997, Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds

London Premiere: 17 September, 1997, Royal Court Theatre

Blue Heart consists of two related short plays, both teasingly entertaining and brilliantly executed, one about a father and daughter, the other about a mother and son. In Heart’s Desire, a father, mother and aunt are waiting for a woman to arrive home after years in Australia. In Blue Kettle a middle-aged man and his girlfriend are involved in a con trick, making elderly women believe they are the man’s long-lost mother. But neither play is what it seems. Something catastrophic is happening which disrupts and destroys them.

By one of the country’s leading writers, Blue Heart was an immediate hit at the Edinburgh Festival and won a coveted Fringe First Award. The production was also a huge international success, touring to countries including Brazil, Israel, Hungary, Portugal, Germany, Mexico and New York.

‘The play of the year’

The Independent

‘these are substantial, provocative, immensely stylish works which create an unsettling mixture of wild laughter and profound unease…a major hit’

Daily Telegraph

‘A fiendishly clever and surreal play, timed to perfection’

The Guardian

‘My advice: run, don’t walk, to Brooklyn… Otherwise you will miss one of the wittiest, most gorgeously performed theatrical events’

New York Times