Theatre review: Radiant Boy - A Haunting

Nancy Netherwood's Radiant Boy is subtitled "A Haunting," and is framed as the story of an exorcism. But horror fans will probably be disappointed as this is a gentler, more elusive kind of haunting, more Emily Brontë than William Peter Blatty. It's 1983 and Russell (Stuart Thompson) has returned from London, where he's been studying singing at a conservatoire, to the home where he grew up in a small town in the North-East of England. He and his mother Maud (Wendy Nottingham) are awkward and chilly around each other, and while Russell claims to be ill, he seems wary of whatever cure his mother might have in mind, to the point of making you wonder why he's come back in the first place. It transpires he's had a kind of fit that's affected him before, and this time it almost caused him to hurt someone he cares about.

In what they've always considered to be a form of possession, Russell sometimes hears a female Voice (Renée Lamb) singing local folk songs to him; occasionally she'll even take over, speaking through him in moments he then has no memory of.

The case has caught the attention of Father Miller (Ben Allen,) a priest who doesn't like to call himself an exorcist - and whose approach mixing pop-psychology with mysticism is unlikely to have formal approval from the Catholic Church in any case. With the house starting to get snowed in, Miller spends the night trying to bring the Voice to the surface, find out what it wants, and hopefully set the boy free from it. But what happens instead is more akin to Russell starting to understand where the Voice fits into his life.

The resulting show is hard to categorise - over the course of the encounter the Voice speaks through Russell, revealing things about Miller it couldn't possibly know; it makes both boy and priest bleed without leaving any wounds; and it manifests some talcum powder falling from the ceiling. OK well maybe they're not all equally impressive. But for all these trappings Júlia Levai's production doesn't really push the horror angle (unless you count the dreary curtains of Tomás Palmer's set,) keeping Netherwood's play interesting but very low-key.

The show's queerness is very much to the fore but also hard to pin down - by the second act this story of a young man who's haunted by a female voice trying to get him to confront who he really is feels very strongly like a trans allegory, but it's also quite openly acknowledged that Russell is gay, that this has caused a lot of bullying that led him to be isolated, and that Maud isn't happy about it but is accepting of it. We also have the Voice picking up the fact that Miller's apparently very selective approach to accepting cases always seems to land on the hauntings of good-looking young men, and Russell's friend Steph's (Lamb) crush on a female classmate.

I enjoyed Radiant Boy but wasn't quite decided by the end on whether its deliberate vagueness was a strength or a weakness. For the former it's quite refreshing to have a story that so resists spelling itself out to the audience. For the latter I think the range of queer subjects it touches on leaves too many gaps - for a story set in the early eighties I would have expected more acknowledgment, if only metaphorically, of the coming AIDS pandemic, and I do wonder if the period was only chosen to add Ultravox and Yazoo to the soundtrack, and give Russell a New Romantic look (and Steph describing his strappy mauve tank top as "butch" surely has to come with a [citation needed] in any era.) Certainly interesting, certainly different, I liked that it leaves you questioning what it's really about, but was less keen on the niggling feeling that it doesn't quite know itself.

Radiant Boy - A Haunting by Nancy Netherwood is booking until the 14th of June at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Little Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Olivia Spencer.