It sounds like a challenge for an improv troupe: could you set Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher in an underfunded NHS mental hospital and illustrate the story with the songs of the 70s folk band Lindisfarne? That’s the brief gamely taken on by playwright Paul Sirett in Clear White Light and, unlikely as it seems, it kind of works. Rarely has the market for psychiatric gothic-horror folk-rock been so well catered for – and judging by the sellout run, it’s not before time.
Not that the hybrid is entirely seamless. To superimpose the story of a student nurse’s first night shift on an understaffed ward in St Nicholas Hospital, Gosforth, on to Poe’s haunted-house chiller takes a bit of stretching. One is an everyday portrayal of psychosis, medication and self-harm in the NHS, the other is a dark-and-stormy 19th-century novella about Roderick Usher and his cataleptic twin sister. On one hand, the scenes of hospital life err on the prosaic, on the other, those of ghoulish apparitions lean towards the far-fetched. Yet Sirett fuses the two with relatively little friction while twisting the plot to offer a sympathetic portrait of mental illness and a commentary on the way anyone can be affected by such illness.
In this he’s helped, in Joe Douglas’s debut production as artistic director, by the sweet-natured performances of Bryony Corrigan as the student nurse and Joe Caffrey as Rod, her Usher-like superior. Both have the convincing air of professionals who have dedicated themselves to others at the expense of their own wellbeing.
The enterprise was inspired by the late Alan Hull who, as well as being a fan of Poe’s book, worked as a psychiatric nurse before finding fame with Lindisfarne. He wrote Lady Eleanor in response to The Fall of the House of Usher and the band’s first single Clear White Light after a shift at the hospital. With the band’s Ray Laidlaw and Billy Mitchell as musical directors, the show is interspersed with these and other bittersweet songs sympathetically sung by Charlie Hardwick. Odd though the concept may be, it is staged with too much clarity of purpose, political nous and honest intent not to be touching.
Live theatre, Newcastle, until 10 November.
