The Haunted Bride (tour – Radlett)
“ I wants to make yer flesh creep” declared the fat boy in The Pickwick Papers. His creator Charles Dickens, like many of his contemporaries, was somewhat addicted to the same pastime and wrote a whole succession of ghost stories for the magazines which he edited. To Be Read At Dusk is now voiced by John Goodrum for the Rumpus Theatre Company in the dramatised shape of The Haunted Bride.
Now she is serving a young contessa, travelling with an older companion. Then it was Clara, a young bride troubled with premonitions of disaster as Tom whisks her off on a whirlwind honeymoon trip which culminates in the Palazzo della Vita, a somewhat ill-named mansion. Will history repeat itself? We are drawn slowly but inexorably into the strange pattern of events and characters.
All these are portrayed by Amanda Howard and Neil Bull, both of whom switch accents, ages and personalities without costume changes against the simplest of settings (two chairs, a bench, swagged curtains) but with quite complex sound (David Gilbrook) and lighting (Duncan Hands) effects to shift location and mood around us. It’s all well acted, very intense and might have been even more concentrated played straight through without an interval.
