Christie in Love

Fans, if that really is the correct term, of Ludovic Kennedy’s 10 Rillington Place, or the subsequent film, will be familiar with the story of John Reginald Christie, hanged in 1953 for murders which took place in the 1940s and ‘50s. That film focussed a great deal on the way Christie used his own status, and relative intelligence, to escape conviction and pin the blame on a gullible young Welshman, Timothy Evans. This production, which revives Howard Brenton’s 1969 play, uncovers Christie’s sexual motivations during an aggressive and often brutal interrogation by two London coppers.

Most affecting here, by far, is the use of a life-size puppet upon which Christie acts out his extreme sexual fantasies. Equipped with all the right holes, the puppet is able to absorb the brunt of Christie’s violence and sexual abuse without—and this is most harrowing—giving any reaction. The doll’s silence intimates at Christie’s complete control over its person. The problem here is that the character of Christie seems insufficiently forceful to ever gain control over the women upon which he preys. Compared to Richard Attenborough’s insidiously manipulative Christie, this one is plain wet.

Formed a little under a year ago, Boomerang Theatre hold the expressed aim of performing in intimate spaces which reduce the audience’s distance from the actors, and increase their involvement in the production. In the Studio at Zoo Southside, the company certainly have such a space, and they use it very well indeed. Christie’s aggressive sex scenes with the doll certainly have an amplified unpleasantness when played like this. The way in which the actors operate the sound cues on a tape player, or shift the sparse set furniture is similarly successful, restricting the drama and all of the mechanics which produce it to the space immediately in front of the audience. There is no backstage area, no production team, nothing external to the drama.

Still, Brenton’s 1969 play tells us little about the connection between sexual repression and violence which one can’t glean from a single episode of Silent Witness. The company get good mileage out of their intense, uncomfortable style of theatre but, overall, this is not particularly inspiring.