★★☆☆☆
The night is dark and stormy, the house is old and creepy, the mute manservant has been on the booze and there are strange stirrings in the attic. In 1932 James Whale turned JB Priestley’s early novel Benighted into a film, retitled The Old Dark House, starring Boris Karloff; now it has been adapted for the stage.
Priestley’s 1927 thriller voiced themes that would become hallmarks of his drama, notably a preoccupation with moral conscience and social responsibility, and a lingering suspicion that the action’s uncanny goings-on might all be a dream or illusion. Duncan Gates’s theatrical version suffers from a fatal confusion of tone, lurching from spoof to spooky via some tediously earnest speechifying. Similarly, Stephen Whitson’s production, though energetically performed, has a frantic grab-bag feel to it, tossing us a tatty laugh here, a scrap of tremulous melodrama there.
It does, however, look splendid. Gregor Donnelly’s expressionistic set is black and gleaming, as if slick with rain, and as unsettlingly skewed as an Escher artwork, all crooked beams, wonky walls and forbidding doorways. This eerie domicile in the wild Welsh countryside is home to the weird Femm family — rueful Horace, his embittered, morbidly religious sister, Rebecca, their sinister butler, Morgan, and their violent cousin Saul, a shellshocked casualty of the Great War. Into their grisly ménage wander five lost travellers: young couple Philip and Margaret Waverton and their chirrupy friend Roger, as well as a prosperous northern industrialist on a catastrophic joyride with a feisty chorus girl. As thunder and lightning rage outside, they reveal intimate secrets that might change their lives — if they can survive until morning.
Initially the staging amuses, with some daft but deft doubling of roles, and Michael Sadler leading the comical gurning as the swivel-eyed host Horace and the unnerving Morgan. Yet the piece stutters to a standstill when it tries for gravitas, before launching itself manfully towards a manic conclusion that fails to chill, move or amuse. It’s a shame, because there’s potential here. However, this is less a compelling mystery than just a horrible muddle.
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