Review: Musty, dusty air. Strange noises � was that rumbling thrum from the throat of an unseen animal or a piece of stage machinery? And stairs.
Star rating: ****
Musty, dusty air. Strange noises - was that rumbling thrum from the throat of an unseen animal or a piece of stage machinery? And stairs. Not your carpeted "welcome, dear audience" variety but shabby flights of time-worn stairs that twist through every level of the Citz back-stage warren of corridors, cubby-holes and derelict upper reaches.
It's this masked dimension, the hidden-away repository of whatever gubbins are needed to create and stage illusions, that writer and director David Leddy uses as a springboard for his promenade mystery tour through a tale of Victorian gothic horror that chimes, unnervingly, with our own times. For while costumes may change, celebrities fade from memory and society itself is keen to strike a more caring, just and watchful pose, human nature retains its old fascination with cruelty and glamour, sex and power - for "illusion" think "deceit" and then inhale the dark, tainted bouquet of Leddy's Sub Rosa with its own play on words and meanings: the phrase translates as "covert", while all the characters are cunningly named after real roses . . .
Those characters are distilled from the stages of Victorian music hall and the pages of penny-dreadful crime stories. Impresario Hunter runs the Winter Palace (the Citz, now shrouded in disuse) for his own profit and pleasure. We never see him. But others speak, in Leddy's vivid and superbly-cadenced monologues, of Hunter's predatory abuse of under-age girls, his callous indifference to the welfare of his performers. Will his tyranny invite revolution? Will child-star/victim Flora - like Hunter, never seen but ever-present - be the catalyst for change? A tremendous cast of six, with Alison Peebles and Finlay Welsh especially chilling in their accounts of self-serving connivance, conjure up a guignol crime dipped in a theatricality that unerringly lures us in.
- Ends January 31. Hurry.
