Blood spilt in murder, blood in heredity, thicker than water - the Oedipus myth plays on this ambiguity, and its themes of patricide and incest are still potent. Lars Noren's Blood, now running at the Royal Court, is a modern version of the myth. Rosa and Eric Sabato, who had to flee Pinochet's Chile in the seventies, were forced to leave their eight year-old son in hospital because of his injured foot. They have looked in vain for him since then, and now, 20 years later, when they have given up hope, Eric has started an affair with Luca, one of his young male psychoanalytic patients, and Rosa, meeting this young man at one of her book-signings, is ineluctably drawn to him. Tragedy ensues. 
      The play was at first rivetting, partly because of superb acting by the four protagonists, and because of the convincing depiction of the Sabatos' marriage, with its mixture of intimacy and apartness. But as the action progressed, it elicited increasing irritation at its implausibility. Why, when he claims to be constantly thinking of their lost son, and knows young Luca to be in search of his biological parents, and to owe his a limp to a childhood injury, does the obvious not occur to Eric at least? 'It's strange how one day you suddenly understand something you've seen for a long time without seeing it', says Rosa at the beginning of the play, but if this is a plea for her and her husband's obtuseness, it fails. 
      The play's implausibility only adds to the annoying sense of melodrama. Noren piles it on in a way that seems almost a caricature of Nordic lugubriousness. Of course the couple go to Oedipus Rex, and of course they have to be Jewish as well as socialist, so that in the re-enacted torture scene (which also reenacts Ariel Dorfman's Death of a Maiden) their race only adds to their problems. When, at the end of Blood, the television presenter asks if every generation is 'compelled to re-enact the same tragedy', and whether it is 'the artist's task to find and shape this tragedy from a stream of inexplicable actions', the audience may well feel like answering 'no' to both these rhetorical questions.
Jane O'Grady