The Royal Shakespeare Company has a massive hit about a girl with telekinetic powers. But her name is Matilda, not Carrie. Eager to repeat the success of Les Misérables, in 1988 the RSC thought it had found another musical juggernaut with a stage adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, already made into a classic horror movie by Brian De Palma. But the show was panned in Stratford and flopped on Broadway.
This is the first London revival, and while not the shocker that legend suggests, it’s easy to see why this version of Cinderella with a slaughterhouse ending failed to fly first time round. In an attempt to negotiate the uncertainties of tone in a book and score in which High School Musical meets schlock horror and blousy melodrama, Gary Lloyd’s production opts largely for safety and blandness. Apart from the lurid lighting that signals every moment of horror like a visual migraine.
Lloyd’s approach successfully stifles the giggles that sometimes bubble to the surface as Kim Criswell’s murderous, bible-thumping maniac of a mother suppresses her teenager daughter’s attempts to grow up and go to the ball, or rather the school prom. But it renders the story harmless.
Carrie needs to be more than perfectly pleasant. It needs to make us afraid with its blood-soaked lullabies and reveries of revenge, and its pitching of smooth-skinned, long-limbed mean girls against the messy confusions and inner turmoils of Carrie, whose humiliation at the hands of her peers during her first menstruation has catastrophic consequences. It needs to remind that there is a Carrie inside all of us just waiting to be unleashed.
The attempt to update the story to the present day stretches the credulity, but the saving grace is Evelyn Hoskins’ mesmerising, exquisitely centred performance as the flame-haired teenage avenger whose awakening desire to fit in with the crowd only sets her further apart.
• At Southwark Playhouse until 30 May. Box office: 020-7407 0234.
