Reviews

The Haunted Bride (tour – Radlett)

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22 October 2011

“ 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.

The two main we first meet are the narrators. One is a peripatetic lady’s-maid called Carolina Hodgkins and the other is Giovanni Baptists, one of those useful all-purpose valet-cum-travel guide-cum universal fixers much in demand by wealthy young English gentlemen venturing onto the European continent for the first time. They meet again unexpectedly some time after the events which developed around their first encounter.

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.