GRIEF, CLASS, AND THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
Press night having moved about and gone incommunicado, this is from when I bought a preview ticket at Richmond..same cast and production.
Paul Unwin, author of the play, has talked with the chief investigator Guy Lyon Playfair, heard some of the guttural tapes of whatever-it-was talking through Janet. The programme note suggests he emerged genuinely wondering about “forces being unleashed” in that house. And I expected it to be a Christmas-season woo-woo ghost story, to appease the post-Christian generations which , having binned God, will believe anything.
But it turns out a bit subtler than that , despire all the bangs and flashes, a certain Paul Kieve illusion and one remarkable furniture displacement. While it is not as exciting as it hopes, for me above all it holds two remarkable and honest performances .
Emerging from the first half, a front of house worker asked what I thought and I found myself saying “It’s sort of sad”. So it is. Lee Newby’s set is wonderful – the dreary little house ripped open, two storeys with the floor hollowed between, the depressing familiar sense of that time of strikes and power cuts and national decline. Mum Peggy – Catherine Tate – is down-to-earth, marshalling her two hyper, larking daughters and a small son as they come in from school, while coping with the pressure of a husband’s desertion (he comes back once a week to get his welfare payment, often drunk and frightening). As it opens she is trying to get the kids to sit down to supper, and is interrupted by a bossy neighbour (Mo Sesay) who helps out a bit as “Uncle Ray”. Then more intrusively the intruder is a whiskery busybody armed with cameras , a tape recorder and three ice creams, to disrupt her attept at a family supper. This is Maurice Grosse, humbler sidekick to Playfair, ex-army and “inventor”, who makes himself at home nipping upstairs to install motionsensor camera in the children’s bedroom.
It is clear that we are weeks or months into the psychic “investigation’, and poor Peggy just has to put up with it. There’s a sharp sense of class: these educated men with posher accents make themselves the bosses, feeling quite comfortable invading a working-class home. When Peggy demurs about how she gets up in the night and might be seen by the cameras, he breezily advises “stay low”, commando-style. There’s a powercut – this ist the 70s – some bangs and larks from the girls, strange wild behaviour and coma from Janet and – properly heartbreaking – tears and terror from the little boy.
Hence my sadness, rhe one useful legacy of a so so play. A mother is trying to make an home normal against a pulse of poverty ,abandonment and nervousness about the husband’s next invasion; her situation is not improved by the psychical-researchers’ interruptions. One child – Ella Schrey-Yeats as Janet – is mentally unstable, or at least hysterical; the other (Grace Molony’s Margaret) reassures her mother that it\s all just a prank. Maurice Grosse the busybody is brilliantly evoked by David Threlfall: he has a cowed reverenace for the unseen Playfair, and utter belief about “portals” opening between the living and the dead . He theorizes, out of his own grief at a lost daughter, that Janet in her collapse is being “used” by a spirit, and it might be his lost one. There’s an extraordinary innocent moment cruelty when he feels the child’s head, feverish, and talks of how psychic pseudoscience calls this “the fire!” like the one which caused, allegeldy, Brazilian child to self-combust. Tate is excellent in her distressed respectfulness. I hope these days she’d throw him out.
The second half, however – this is a short play, two hours overall – picks up more emotional reality in Maurice: he is grieving for his lost daughter Janet and, in a creepy nocturnal moment when poor Peggy is trying to get some sleep upstairs, wraps the sleeping child in his own daughter’s blanket and tries to get the dead girl to talk ‘through” her. Because of the actor’s skill. there is proper emotional power in Threlfall’s adding his real grief to the household’s alrady heavy burden of hysteria, adolescence, mental instability and fear. When his furious wife appears late on, the kid emits the famously terrifying guttural devil-voice which convinced so many researchers at the time that Something Else was speaking from beyond. And Maurice is no longer prophet, just a dotty old codger searching for his shoes.
Its a sad nasty old story, wrongly puffed as spooky. But as a study in class, hysteria, grief, credulity, exploitation, mental disturbance, adolescent power and struggling motherhood it has its place, because of Tate’s dignity and Threlfall’s humanity .
. www.atgtickets.com
theatreCat 