All Blood Runs Red – Leeds Playhouse

An intimating the dog show is always a meta challenge, so you knew there was a need to pay attention as they rigorously stress tested Jean Luc Godard’s idea that ‘a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order’.

This company has always played with form and narrative structure as Mancunian actor Morgan Bailey tells the mainly forgotten story of adventurer Eugene Bullard, as he interweaves his own experiences in France playing a black GI in his first feature film. To add another layer he tells the story of wanting to pitch a movie of Bullard’s life after he fled the attempted lynching of his father in the deep south in the early twentieth century.

Bailey also wrote this piece with the company’s Co-Artistic Director Andrew Quick, who was also fascinated by a daring man who fled racist America for more enlightened France. There he became by turn a decorated soldier in the Great War, an early black fighter pilot, a jazz drummer, club owner, friend to artistic big hitters like Picasso and Hemmingway and a resistance fighter in World War II before ending his days as New York lift attendant. 

During this one man show Bailey mulls over the idea that Bullard’s story has been erased from history because he was black. In reality, while the flying jazz man’s life was colourful, he was no Picasso or Hemmingway, so just about worth a theatre production, but not a starring role in twentieth century history.

Bailey is an engaging performer who is not scared to explore his own sense of identity, offering some moving moments when he talks about how he was treated by so called progressive creatives over the channel.

As this is an imitating the dog production there is plenty of their trademark high tech video work as Bailey wandered the sparse stage with a big white card where images from Bullard’s crazy life are projected, and he did well to hit his numerous cues.

By imitating the dog standards this is more intimate production with a subtle jazz tinged soundscape, and less emphasis on their often frenetic, but always inventive, video effects. Visual and sound techniques are a key part of helping sharing narrative, especially one as complicated as this, and there is an eerie conversation across the centuries about race and identity between Bailey and an AI generated Bullard floating on the main video wall at the back of the stage.

This is not vintage imitating the dog, and there is plenty to think about in this tale of a rich life well lived, but not one that would be enough to elevate Eugene Bullard to the front rank of history.

All Blood Runs Red tours to Peterborough, Salford, Lancaster, Doncaster and Warwick. To find out how to book go to https://www.imitatingthedog.co.uk/dates/

Reviewer: Paul Clarke

Reviewed: 16th February 2025

North West End UK Rating: