Set in "the Gentlemen's block" at Broadmoor, where, during the 19th- and early 20th-century, those murderers who were a cut above the average killer were detained in the atmosphere of a very exclusive gentlemen's club, Steve Hennessy's double-bill of plays is clever, competent, and skilfully performed. However, while both dramas resurrect these killers with success, neither play sheds light on individual madness or the madness of national psyches engaged in war.
The first play, The Murder Club, is a very local affair telling of conman Ronald True's murder of Olive Young in 1922, and his arrival at Broadmoor. Here he gains the psychological advantage over former actor Richard Prince (who is incarcerated for the murder of matinee idol William Terriss) and gullible warder John Coleman.
The background is Britain's genocide of the Kurds in Iraq. But Hennessy gets too caught up in the cat-and-mouse games between True and Prince to develop this aspect fully, and the best writing of the evening comes from the cynical narrator, Olive Young, who describes her own demise and picks over the bones of her short, sad life with the detachment of the very damaged. Charlotte Pyke is outstanding in the role.
Wilderness, about American Civil War veteran William Chester Minor, who spent his time in Broadmoor contributing to the Oxford English Dictionary is a more dramatically interesting play, but it doesn't quite make the leap to a wider commentary about the way we condone some murders and abhor others.
Still, it is an intelligent evening, and the two plays are cleverly linked by Coleman, the kindly prison warder who worries that the criminally insane might give Broadmoor a bad name.
· Until January 31. Box office: 020-7373 3842.
