Albert Belz’s Yours Truly cries out for a foreboding set, atmospheric lighting and a portentous soundscape that gets under your skin. That BackYard Theatre’s co-op production is sharing the Gryphon Theatre space with Kapitall Kids Theatre’s The Sword in the Stone may go some way towards excusing the lack of such production values. What we are left with relies almost entirely on the quality of the writing, acting and directing.

There is no doubting the excellence of Belz’s script. It excites reviewers whenever Yours Truly is produced* which is not often enough. Because we know in advance it is about Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel murders, Belz puts the focus on the people, relationships and events that led up to them, dwelling more on motive than means and opportunity. Eschewing the stock devices of a classic whodunit, he casts us, his audience, as omniscient detectives with the ability to spy on those who inexorably progress towards being suspects, enablers, perpetrators and victims.

Of the many theories claimed as ‘the truth’ over time, Belz opts for the one set out in the graphic novel From Hell (written by Alan More; drawn by Eddie Campbell) and made into a movie in 2001. The same perpetrator (who was actually 72 at the time and in ill health) also is fingered in a 1988 television adaptation but it does not implicate Queen Victoria or her grandson in the conspiracy, as From Hell and Yours Truly do.

More importantly Belz reveals a society that could, in essence, be ‘back to the future’ for us if we continue to let the iniquitous inequities of ‘market forces’ (known as laissez faire back then) widen the gap between the have and have-nots. Privilege, class, money or the lack of it and warped value systems – characterised through a distortion of Freemasonry beliefs and rituals – have everything to do with this riveting take on who did what to whom and why.  

In this Simon Boyes-directed production, a bit of a slide show and the sound of the Bow Bells orientate us to London in 1888. Ange Fitzharris anchors the production with a strong yet vulnerable Mary Kelly and her relationship with artist Walter Sickert, delineated finely by Lewis McLeod, is one major through-line of plot – along with her developing love for would-be haberdasher Harvey (Helen Mackenzie)

A second plot-strand is Sickert’s friendship with stuttering Eddy (well played by Martin Tidy), Eddy’s love for shop-girl Annie Crook (splendidly portrayed by Harriet Prebble) and the complications that ensue by virtue of Eddy’s true identity. While the unseen powers-that-be turn a blind eye to his visits to a ‘dandy’s brothel’ which masquerades as a gentlemen’s club, Annie’s pregnancy to Eddy cannot be countenanced.

The solution brings us to the third plot strand, involving Sir William Gull, freshly initiated into a masonic guild, sometime physician to Queen Victoria and an expert on the ventromedial frontal cortex. Malcolm Gillett seem to be thinking this role though rather than inhabiting it and letting it be, so has yet to engage the audience with Gull’s brilliance and passion. If and when he does so, his decline into madness will be simultaneously scary, appalling and sad. Meanwhile the energy drops noticeably when he is the focus of the drama, which rather subverts the play’s build to its climax.  

For the rest, Boyes and his cast honour Belz’s dramaturgical skill by maintaining good rhythm, pacing and focus on the developments and often surprising changes in their characters and relationships. Far more dramatic than the more prurient aspects of the story, which the play stitches in by voice-over reportage, is the poignancy and pathos of the fates these everyday people face as they try to survive in this ruthlessly unjust society.  

If you have never seen Yours Truly before, or want to be reminded how good it is, catch it the Gryphon Theatre.

*Links to reviews of Bats premiere (2006); Auckland production (2011)

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