Review: Benighted (Old Red Lion)
Five travellers, lost in Wales and marooned by a storm, take refuge in a ruined pile whose grim secrets are revealed only gradually. Yes, Benighted is an old dark house mystery. And not just ‘an’ but ‘the’, for it was JB Priestley‘s 1927 novel that first spawned the phrase when it was adapted by Hollywood as The Old Dark House.
Good ghost stories at Christmas are second only to pantomimes, so Duncan Gates‘ new stage adaptation is a shrewd seasonal choice. Producer Damien Tracey has pushed the boat out with a pocket-sized cornucopia of brooding designs that evoke the novel’s menacing mood, with Gregor Donnelly‘s crooked-house dark-wood set dragged to hell by Zia Bergin-Holly’s resourceful lighting and David Gregor’s forbidding soundscape.
Only, ghosts come there none. The menace in Benighted, mostly unseen and intangible, is all too human. Elderly patriarch Horace Femm (Michael Sadler) presides over the shards of his family: the sexually repressed Rebecca and the battle-damaged Saul, who is kept in check by a silent old retainer, Morgan. Unless there’s gin to be had.
With nine characters played by a cast of six there’s bound to be doubling, but the programme ought to have kept quiet about some of it. Thus Sadler, who is the most polished performer in a variable cast, is also the drunken servant, with two of the hapless visitors doing dual service as the other Femms.
Sadler gets the best lines ("Everywhere else is in ruins. We all are") and he savours them all. Moreover, he alone keeps over acting at bay when delivering the monologue that Gates assigns, somewhat drearily, to each character in turn.
Tom Machell and Harrie Hayes do well as the lacklustre Wavertons, Philip and Margaret. Once some dodgy motor-car miming is out of the way they give the show a solid backbone. Matt Maltby is the excitable Roger who falls for Jessica Bay’s common-as-muck chorus girl, while Ross Forder sustains credibility both as Rebecca Femm and as the cuckolded William Porterhouse.
Director Stephen Whitson takes his cue from Gates’s dialogue, which is tonally all over the place, and lurches from tension to slapstick in a way that suggests a lack of trust both in the material and in his own ability to tease much horror from the 70-minute script. They both need an editor.
Nevertheless, Benighted still makes for a diverting evening. Compared to Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, currently running in the West End, it’s a trifle, albeit one made from strange fruit and bitter dreams, but it’s entertaining enough. And when Maltby and Machell as a Bane-like Saul slug it out to the death we get a glimpse of what might have been.
Benighted runs at the Old Red Lion until 7 January.
