Bluebeard: A Fairy Tale for Adults

There’s an endearing, Weimar cabaret-cum-DIY quality to young outfit Milk Presents’ innovative take on this centuries-old French folktale. On a stage littered with low-tech props that include a gramophone, stepladder, bucket, megaphone, overhead projector and even a bicycle used to power up some stage lights, the five-strong cast weave dance, storytelling, mime, comedy and song, coaxing the sexual thrust, misogyny and, most triumphantly, the humour from this most possessing of fairy stories.

After an alarming opening involving some gratuitous enjoyment of mashed potato and masturbation (separately), Adam Robertson’s moustachioed, twinkly-eyed Bluebeard prowls the stage like a puffed-up peacock, charming a procession of women unable to resist his self-assured seductions. Each is then coolly dispatched in increasingly imaginative ways (a drowning in a bucket here, a suffocation with tea bags there) as it becomes quickly apparent that this one isn’t going to end happily ever after.

Indeed, Bluebeard’s traditional comeuppance at the play’s denouement is conspicuously absent here, as the quintet opt instead to take a well-aimed pot-shot at idealistic notions of happiness wrapped up in a fantasy white wedding and a life of domestic bliss. It’s certainly a nice twist.

It doesn’t all work onstage – some projections are hard to decipher on the bedsheet at the back of the room and the din occasionally overrides any subtlety. But the buoyancy with which the fourth wall-breaking cast zip about embracing the chaos means we allow them a bit of leeway.

It's anarchic, satirical, livewire fun – just as the Fringe should be.