Blue Heart

Two exhilarating and teasingly entertaining one-act plays from one of the UK’s leading playwrights.

Heart’s Desire sees a family awaiting their daughter’s return from Australia, though in a series of alternative scenarios, the play collapses as it keeps veering off in unexpected and ridiculous directions.

Blue Kettle tells the story of conman Derek and the five women he misleads into believing he is their biological son. Try as he might, Derek’s plans are scuppered as the play is invaded by a virus.

In Caryl Churchill’s ever-inventive style, the two plays in Blue Heart pull apart language and structure in a way that is theatrically remarkable and fast paced, in a stirring yet truthful exploration of family and relationships.

Blue Heart was first performed at Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, in August 1997 in a touring co-production by Out of Joint and the Royal Court Theatre.

This edition was published alongside the first major revival of Blue Heart, nearly twenty years after its premiere, in a co-production by the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, and Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol, in 2016.

‘A fiendishly clever and surreal play’ Guardian
- Guardian

‘The play of the year’
- Independent

‘Substantial, provocative, immensely stylish works which create an unsettling mixture of wild laughter and profound unease… a major hit’
- Telegraph