Thought-provoking fright night
The Exorcist
They’re raising heartbeats even before you’ve taken your seat at this fitfully shocking, knowingly creaky and yet on balance welcome theatrical fright-night – based on the 1971 William Peter Blatty novel that gave rise to the 1973 film.
Composer and sound-design whizz Adam Cork thickens the air with chest-rattling rumbles. Then it’s a total blackout, a deafening thunderclap that provokes the kind of collective scream usually reserved for rollercoasters – and you’re plunged into a world in which it seems credible ( give or take a hefty pinch of salt) for a young girl to suffer the nightmare of demonic possession.
Just as Soho needs to have a few sex shops, so the West End needs to cater for thrill-seekers. Jenny Seagrove, who deftly plays the fraught actress-mother of Regan, the sweet-as-candy kid who turns devil-child after finding a Ouija board in their rented home, recently bemoaned the dearth of straight plays in town. I’m as game as anyone for more Ibsen after-hours, but there’s a gap in the market too for work that makes people jump out of their skins.
Perhaps you can have something that makes you both squeal and interrogate that squeal. After a so-so tryout in Birmingham last Hallowe’en, the show now delivers the schlockhorror goods; but it also proffers a decent slice of food for thought.
Inevitably, doing a direct compareand-contrast between the celluloid masterpiece and this production does the stage newcomer few favours. John Pielmeier, the US playwright, gives us something like a television script that jolts rather than glides from scene to scene; and the opening Middle Eastern vignette, introducing us to Father Merrin (the elderly priest who rides to the rescue, at the risk to his ticker) is borderline incomprehensible.
Yet the piece does justify its temerity in walking in such hallowed footsteps. We’re not short-changed in terms of atmosphere: there’s abundant darkness, with bursts too of retinadazzling light, much unsettling use of projection to suggest scuttling shadows, and Anna Fleischle’s set pulls out all the stops in evoking a domicile beset by recalcitrant doors and electrics that go kaput in the night. The checklist of set-piece moments won’t disappoint fans of the film: we get projectile vomiting, violent bed-rocking, a dash of levitation and that famous head-rotation, up to a logistically achievable point.
What we get further – despite the best efforts of the clunking dialogue to thwart it – is a gathering sense of dramatic engagement over 90 minutes. We may scoff at religion, yet the basic mechanics of the show require us to surrender to an idea of the supernatural. Moreover, the contested diagnosis of Regan’s monstrous behaviour reflects a cultural battle over femininity: has she truly been taken over by Satan, or is she – as the first priest in attendance, Adam Garcia’s Damien, suggests – manifesting explicable psychological disturbances?
The story, I think, taps age-old fears about the moment a biddable child turns unruly adolescent. When Clare Louise Connolly’s Regan self-harms with a knife, emits buckets of X-rated filth (lip-synching to Ian Mckellen, all purring malevolence) or stabs a crucifix in her groin, she could almost be playing devil’s advocate about the constraints on her freedom. You might even liken her character to an Antichrist version of the restive Nora in A Doll’s House.
The biggest overall complaint is that, iconic silhouetted arrival aside – nicely reproduced here – Peter Bowles’s Merrin is almost wallpaper, hoarsely babbling the Bible as the exorcism’s climax approaches. But perhaps his irrelevance is the point. This isn’t, finally, about what the men of cloth do, but about the fabric of our society, our families, our sense of self – and how easily that tears.