Theatre of Blood - Press Reviews

No: I am not Chloe Moon. It's true that Improbable’s version of the Observer theatre critic is a woman with a potentially mockable surname, doing a job mostly carried out by men with solid monikers. But I know that Sally Dexter's swaggering blonde bombshell isn't me: not just because of the lack of physical resemblance, but because so little in this giddily enjoyable remake of the 1973 horror movie, which starred Vincent Price, is based on contemporary reality. It is, like most of the wonderful work of Improbable, a fantastic construct, a blast across the bows of the stage. Five years ago it would have been impossible to imagine Improbable at the National, where everything was text-based, settled, writer-propelled - rather than driven by actors or artists. The company behind the junk opera Shockheaded Peter works from improvisation, doesn't much like scripts, is leavened by extraordinary design, and leaves rough edges around their productions. Yet here they are refashioning this strange piece on the South Bank, in which a disgruntled ham takes his revenge on the hacks who have savaged him by murdering them one by one in Shakespearean fashion. Rae Smith's lovely design frames it perfectly: a crumbling, gilt-laden theatre is a trap and a delusion, a place where critics get stuck. It's a one-joke play, and it's over-extended: but then a critic would say that, wouldn't she? You get a lot of enjoyment along the way - and a lot of exquisite in-theatre references. The least earnest reviewer, Bette Bourne in tweed trouser suit and trilby (over big hair), has two poodles called Gwendolen and Cecily. After mincing, they get spectacularly minced in the Titus Andronicus episode: part of the fun of this is guessing what grisly form each murder will take. The Observer critic expires under a hairdryer, with the last kick of her electrocuted body shooting off her scarlet shoes, and the hairdryer hood being rolled up to show a head reduced to a skull. The miraculous Hayley Carmichael - who turns herself into an intellectual plod - is multiply speared to death: not so much Saint Sebastian as badly speared cocktail sausage. Rachael Stirling is distinguished in the difficult romantic role. Jim Broadbent is flexible, extraordinary and ever-changing as the old ham. Even when he's parodying a Shakespearean delivery that is, thank goodness, hardly ever seen now, he humorously supplies a whiff of deadly possibilities. Lolling-limbed, lank-haired, full of false inspiration, he rolls his 'r's like an eager student of Spanish, dumps the emphasis on the wrong syllables and gets fired up when he should be damped down.

You can hardly blame practitioners for wanting to get even with critics after a bad review. The retaliation can sometimes be executed with great aplomb. I once ungallantly wrote of a performance by Helena Bonham-Carter that "it made one pine to be in the restricted-view seating". She wrote: "do let me know if you have to cover any future production I'm in and I will make absolutely sure that you are in the restricted-view seating". The exquisite poise of that riposte is in stark contrast to the strategy of Edward Lionheart, the egregious and outmoded old Shakespearean ham, who, furious at being passed over for the Critics' Circle Best Actor Award, eliminates the reviewers one by one using the violently gory methods pioneered in the plays of his beloved Bard. Lionheart made his first appearance in the 1973 comic horror movie Theatre of Blood, starring Vincent Price as the homicidal thesp, and Diana Rigg as his daughter. He now resurfaces with a vengeance, so to speak, in Improbable’s exuberant stage adaptation in the Lyttelton, written by Lee Simpson and Phelim McDermott (who also directs) and starring the great Jim Broadbent as Lionheart and Rigg's stunning and talented daughter, Rachael Stirling, as his conflicted child. The material is far more at home in a theatre and the adaptors get the maximum mileage out of this by giving it a slightly different framework. Lionheart is now a deranged version of Prospero and the critics are all lured to a defunct Frank Matcham theatre (the fantastic and fantastical set is by Rae Smith) which functions as the equivalent of the magical island where he puts all the reviewers at his mercy. Part of the pleasure of the production comes from the fun it takes in turning up the temperature on the ghoulish camp comedy and in genially satirising the barking self-centredness of certain critics. When, à la Titus Andronicus, Bette Bourne's adorably limp-wristed hack is fed his pet poodles it's through a tube attached to giant mincing machine and his stomach swells like grotesque speeded-up pregnancy. Occasionally, I felt a trick had been missed. Confronted with the corpse of a colleague, the critics I know would think of only one thing: who will get his or her job and how will this affect the game of musical chairs? This version, though, develops into a fascinating debate between Lionheart and the trendy polo-necked critic (Mark Lockyer) who (this is 1973) has just been recruited to become the Literary Manager of the new National Theatre on the South Bank. The fact that this is very venue in which we are sitting imparts an added frisson to the dispute in which Lionheart decries the National as a concrete mausoleum dedicated to the values of state-subsidised Oxbridge directors only one step up from critics. Whether his own commercial actor-manager tradition was a richer alternative is left a moot point in an intelligent, larky evening that offers, in more senses than one, a bloody good show.