Christie in Love is the first production by or at One Sharp! Lunch Theatre. Operating out of the Club Room at the Southern Cross, they present a half-hour or so piece of theatre at 1pm every day. The $16/$12 price of admission rather charmingly also includes soup.

While the price is a little steep for only half and hour of theatre, this seems like a really cool idea and with two more shows already planned it looks set to take off.

Christie in Love is an odd choice of play to launch it (or should that be lunch it, a ha a ha a hahaha). Written by Howard Brenton, a bad boy political playwright of the 70s and 80s, it tells the story of the hunt for and interrogation of John Christie, the serial killer. A play that starts with a series of escalating grotesque limericks and contains masturbation and the onstage murder of a prostitute does not seem to be what one would consider regular lunch time theatre fare. It risks walkouts – there were two the Tuesday I saw it – but with that risk comes great reward…. [More]
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Even if you have gleaned – via a flyer or the Capital Times or Wotzon listings, perhaps – that Rattling Tongues and the Southern Cross Hotel’s ONE SHARP! LUNCH THEATRE is launching itself with Howard Brenton’s 1969 shocker Christie In Love, you could be forgiven for thinking you’d made a mistake on arriving at the hotel in Abel Smith Street.

Nothing on the outside suggests lunchtime theatre is on offer within. And when you venture on inside anyway, there is narry a whiff of a play on the menu, let alone any hint of where to actually find it. Even the rear function room itself (which I went through to because I had seen Fringe shows there before), posts no visible sign that this is where it will happen.

Congratulations, then, to the almost full house – of friends, families and colleagues in the loop, I suspect – who braved the atrocious Thursday weather to find their ways there. The room is set up with tables and chairs and the ticket price includes soup or you can stand at the back for less.

In the immediate aftermath of the Clayton Weatherston trial, there is a bizarre serendipity in Rattling Tongues’ first choice: a short play inspired by the actual case of John Reginald Halliday Christie who, in post WW2 England, murdered at least six women and hid or buried them at 10 Rillington Place. As Howard Brenton portrays him, he blames the women who made him feel inadequate and  the ‘tarts’ in the street enticed him into having sex. Historically his mother and sisters tormented him as a child, he was sexually incompetent and his marriage failed.

Christie in Love premiered in 1969, produced by Portable Theatre upstairs at the Royal Court as part of a populist ‘poor theatre’ break away from naturalism and elitist theatre. Christie was convicted and hanged in 1952, for the murder of his wife. In the play he is exhumed to account for himself, after a victim called Ruth (played by a life-sized rag doll) is dug up from the back yard …  

In a chicken wire pen filled with screwed up newspaper, a Police Constable (Paul Harrop) offsets the tedium and potential horror of digging for bones by reciting a series of very lewd limericks, overseen by his Police Inspector (Jed Brophy). Their Cockney repartee – sort of Musical Hall meets Pinter – soon betrays a warped view of society in general and women in particular.

Once the decayed semi-skull-like mask is peeled away, John Christie (Nick Blake) is revealed as a very ordinary, emotionally repressed and warped little man who would not attract a second glance in the street. It is this very apparent ‘normality’ we are being asked to consider in the context of the misogyny that permeates his interrogation.

Reference is made to the earlier case of Timothy Evans, also a resident of 10 Rillington Place, who was tried for the murder of his wife and baby daughter and hanged for the latter after Christie appeared as witness for the prosecution. And it is the hanging of Christie (on the same gallows) that ends the play. Maybe the original audience knew that the subsequent doubts surrounding the Evans case were instrumental in bringing an end to capital punishment in the UK but the play, as written, does not allow that resonance to come through.

Speaking of resonance, despite the thunderous rain on the fibrolite roof, the Thursday audience seemed to relish this fare as provocative nourishment to add value to their lunch break.

ONE SHARP! LUNCH THEATRE (get your soup at 1pm, the play starts at 1.15 and is over by 1.45pm) is a welcome initiative. This season plays Monday-Friday until 31 July and two more shows are planned: Two in a Room by John Summons, directed by Judith Gibson, 5 – 14 August; and Keep it Rural, written and performed by Tansy Hayden and Asher Smith, 19 – 28 August.

This is clearly an opportunity to attract local writers and help convince them that writing plays is worth their while. 
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Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer