Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange is a play with more questions than answers. One of the reasons it has become a classic is because the audience leaves the theatre after two and a half hours still uncertain whether Christopher, the young black psychiatric patient being argued over by two doctors, is schizophrenic or not.
I never saw the original production in 2000, in which Chiwetel Ejiofor played Christopher. It won the Olivier award for best new play, and was deservedly successful. In 2010 I saw a production at the Arcola with a cast of three women rather than three men. Now it's been revived at the Young Vic with Daniel Kaluuya playing Christopher, Luke Norris as the junior doctor Bruce and David Haigh as the consultant Robert.
The Young Vic's flexible space is used very well by designer Jeremy Herbert to lead in the audience through an anonymous NHS consulting room, with simple blue decor and some oranges on a table. The acting space is very similar, with the audience placed in a surrounding square. The play's unity of time and space produces a story that has great intensity and some dazzling dialogue. Despite the 16-year gap since the first production, it's all highly topical, and only the way the characters light up cigarettes betrays its 1990s origins.
This isn't a play about the parlous state of the NHS and its mental health services, nor is it principally about the careers of junior doctors. Bruce and Robert argue over Christopher's head, and sometimes in his presence, about whether his disturbed state is the result of a borderline personality disorder, or shows signs of paranoid schizophrenia. It's clear the dispute is making the patient worse, whoever is in the right. On the day before his release, Bruce is reluctant to let him go. In the process he puts his career at risk. Robert, as his supervisor, pulls rank in a way which becomes duplicitous and vicious. Christopher becomes the battleground over which they fight. The arguments over medical ethics, racial stereotyping and personal and professional ambition are put with great skill.
Kaluuya is terrific as the disturbed Christopher, poised somewhere between sanity and insanity. Playing a seriously disturbed person is always a real test for an actor, and Kaluuya convinces completely. Norris is equally good as the junior doctor, though the cavalier way in which he challenges his supervisor is a little implausible. Haigh is a hugely experienced actor, but I wonder if he may have been slightly miscast in the role of Robert. His natural gift has always seemed to me to be for comedy, and his portrayal of the flawed consultant has moments when Robert verges on the edge of becoming a buffoon.
Otherwise, this is a cracking revival of a very good play.
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