|
There's A Dose Of Terror If You Wait Until...
|
Anyone who escapes Frederick Knott's Wait Unit Dark with dry palm and even heartbeat must, frankly, be as cold and blank as the concrete waste of Basingstoke's new Town centre. Taut, elaborate, building tension on tension, the play which opened Horseshoe's new season at the Haymarket Theatre on Wednesday culminated in a scene of high-pitched horror as terrifying as anything I can remember seeing for a very long time. The play's crux is the relationship between photographer's wife, Susy Henderson, and the shadowy villain, Harry Roat, played by Roy Boyd, who radiates malevolence and sheer brute nastiness from his first entrance. Boyd milks the part for all its worth, and the sinister, snake-voiced sibilance, clicked-back hair and psychopathic controlled fury of the man in black are the embodiment of evil. Obeying the time-tried conventions of psychological thrillers, the heroine, Susy - played by Jacqueline Pearce - is in the ordinary setting of her home, a basement flat in London, when a sequence of extraordinary events starts to happen to her. What gives the whole plot its added piquancy is the fact that Susy is blind. Roat, with the help of two unwilling accomplices, is trying to recover a doll stuffed with heroin which has fallen into Susy's hands. With her husband lured away, Susy is befriended by a man who claims to be an old Army pal but in reality is in league with Roat. The imposter, Mike (David Gratton) meets a grisly end, but not before he has been won over by Suzy's warm and appealing nature, and has decided to abandon any part in the scheme. Too late, too late, the labyrinthine plots ends in the confrontation which has been presaged almost from the very start, and is bloodcurdlingly frightening. Ms Pearce, of Blake's 7 fame, has as her only aid against the villains a young pre-adolescent girl, Gloria, from upstairs, who helps her with jobs around the flat - a nice, sparky performance this by Bernadette Wilson, Susy, played with a skilful combination of psychic awareness, acute perception and tender vulnerability, ahs all the cards stacked against her - but is it possible her blindness could actually be an advantage? I shall say no more. The only hitch n the production came early on when a light failed to work, but from then on, and when the pace of the action switched up into a higher gear in the later scenes, the gremlins had been eased out and everything ran with clockwork precision. It was marvellous to hear the first-night full house give the cast a rapturous ovation. True, it's a safe play with a broad appeal, but it provides the perfect platform for Horseshoe's new season. Directed by Cyril Frankel, Wait Until Dark runs until April 4 John Fisher. The Gazette Monday 30th March 1981
| 
