A killer thriller to knock ’em dead
Achiller from the Thirties gets a spirited revival at the Salisbury Playhouse. emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall is a splendid (if hoary) yarn about an infirm widow who falls in love with a sinister hotel porter.
At his last place of employment, a woman went missing and duly lost her head, literally.
At first i feared i was going to hate this show. it all seemed so old-fashioned, its posh characters so clipped, the menials so ‘cor blimey’.
But luke Sheppard’s production aims on purpose for that period horror — and it grabbed me. By the end i was jumping out of my skin at every bump and every owl-hoot.
Bossy Mrs Bramson (Gwen Taylor) lives in a gas-lit cottage on the corner of some woods in rural essex. it is October, some time in the Thirties. Wheelchair-bound Mrs Bramson has no telephone.
She lives with her pretty, truculent niece, Olivia (Niamh McGrady), and a couple of servants. Olivia is being courted by a buffoonish member of the local squirearchy (Alasdair Buchan, milking it). Scotland Yard’s inspector Belsize (Daragh O’Malley) turns up to announce the woman from the nearby hotel has gone missing. Dark chords. Gasps.
By the time her torso is discovered in Mrs Bramson’s garden, garrulous charmer Dan — the hotel porter — has turned up and ingratiated himself into Mrs B’s affections.
Olivia realises Dan (excellent Will Featherstone) is a wrong ’un, yet she finds herself drawn to the villain. One of the great lines has the housekeeper wailing: ‘They’re still lookin’ for the ’ead!’
With its drawing-room set and five-scene structure, this show is a time-piece. Yet what fun to see a Scotland Yard inspector in long coat and trilby. One can luxuriate in the archaic conventions and plot improbabilities. The good folk of Salisbury chewed furiously on their toffees. By the end we were all riveted. Plenty of good acting and a faithful re-creation of a Thirties classic. The provinces will love it.
PeOPle sometimes play that game of choosing dinnerparty guests from history. Would you place preachy Gandhi opposite swashbuckler Sir Francis Drake, Mrs Pankhurst next to groper henry Viii?
John Wolfson, a benefactor of Shakespeare’s Globe, has written The Inn At Lydda which imagines a meeting between Tiberius caesar and Jesus. What if the elderly Tiberius had travelled to Judea, keen to meet this miracle-worker christ in order to be cured? And what if, on arriving, he discovered that he was just too late?
Mr Wolfson is surely on to a good idea. i went to the Globe’s candle-lit Sam Wanamaker space full of expectations. Sadly, the production strains for too many laughs, often descending to a level near The life Of Brian. This detracts from the show’s second-half meeting between Tiberius and Jesus, when the action does move up several notches.
Briefly we have a dialogue deserving of its subject, Jesus offering the roman a way out of his troubles — yet he is too arrogant to see it. ‘i came here to be healed, not judged!’
Much as one wants to encourage any positive play about christ, it is a pity Wolfson and director Andy Jordan did not focus more on filling out the story’s characters. For details about Night Must Fall, see originaltheatre.com