Basement Theatre's retelling of the 1888 Whitechapel murders is insinuatingly sinister.
David Aston in Yours Truly
Receiving its first production since its debut at Wellington’s Bats Theatre in 2006 – when it snagged Chapman Tripp Awards for production of the year, most original production and best new New Zealand work – Yours Truly is an insinuatingly sinister retelling of the infamous Whitechapel murders of 1888.
Clearly drawing heavily on Stephen Knight’s speculative non-fiction work Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976) – whose theories have inspired a number of Ripper yarns, including Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s brilliant graphic novel From Hell – Albert Belz recasts this seminal serial killer story as the tale of two young couples in love and in over their heads.
The play is never more effective than when it’s focused on the burgeoning relationships between Eddy (Todd Emerson), Annie (Sophie Henderson) and, in particular, Walter Sickert (Sam Snedden) and Marie Kelly (Dena Kennedy). The foursome’s persuasive performances provide important points of audience identification, rendering the pervasive sense of (sometimes literally) looming menace almost unbearable at times.
Andi Crown also does nicely shaded work as Harvey, while David Aston handles the initially urbane Dr Gull’s increasingly psychotic poetic rhetoric with finesse.
Sustaining and increasing tension over the play’s two-hour running time is quite a feat, one that director Anders Falstie-Jensen achieves with subtlety and restraint.
He is ably abetted in this by sterling work from Sean Lynch (sound design), Estelle Macdonald (costumes) Jessika Verryt (set design) and, most especially, Bonnie Burrill, whose lighting design is so redolent of candles and gaslight. Together they’ve created a chiaroscuro atmosphere of dread that continues to cling after the show’s conclusion.
YOURS TRULY, by Albert Belz, directed by Anders Falstie-Jensen, The Rebel Alliance, Basement Theatre, Auckland, until October 22.