“Spare me the theatricals,” pleads a character in Dion Boucicault’s 1868 Victorian melodrama. Since the play includes forged cheques, lost fathers, music-hall medleys and suicide bids before advancing trains, it is advice that Boucicault himself hardly heeded.
But although, as drama, the piece is palpably absurd, it is put across with great panache by director Phil Willmott and his 12-strong cast.
Boucicault has lately enjoyed a mini-boom, with revivals of London Assurance and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ version of An Octoroon. After Dark is not in that league, hinging as it does on a beleaguered aristocrat’s need to desert his common-law wife and marry a cousin in order to claim his inheritance. The plot is convoluted and the characters paper-thin. The real interest lies in Boucicault’s vision of the teeming tumult of the London streets populated by penniless Crimean veterans, crooks and thieves, and hymn-singing harbingers of the Salvation Army. We’re reminded that in 1868 the London Underground was still a thrilling novelty.
Willmott and his designer, Hannah Postlethwaite, cleverly evoke all this through smoke, lights and two rotating brick arches. The cast play with hand on heart rather than tongue in cheek and there is especially good work from Toby Wynn-Davies as a bent lawyer, Victoria Jeffrey as a malapropistic music-hall queen who talks of “a case of mistaken adultery” and Jemima Watling as the hero’s abandoned wife seeking a watery grave. This may be a ripely preposterous piece of popular theatre but it is done with a fine, unpatronising flourish.
At the Finborough theatre, London, until 6 July
