Review: Redcliffe, Southwark Playhouse Borough ★★★½

Redcliffe Southwark Playhouse photo by Pamela Raith

A TENDER act of reclamation that could find more courage

In September 1753, two men were hanged on St Michael’s Hill in Bristol. When the cart drew under the gallows, one kissed the other’s hand. They had already thrown their tufts of flowers as a signal. Then the cart drew away.

That image, recorded in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal and repeated in newspapers from the Kentish Weekly Post to the Manchester Mercury, is one of the most quietly devastating in the long and brutal history of the persecution of gay men in Britain. The Buggery Act of 1533 had made sexual activity between men punishable by death, and it would remain so until 1861. Richard Arnold, a pub landlord of around sixty, and William Critchard, a footman of about twenty-four, were arrested in August 1752 after being observed at the Swan Alehouse on Broad Street by its landlord, John Baber, who swore his witness statement and sealed their fate. They refused to name accomplices. They confessed their guilt to God, they said, and therefore thought it unnecessary to repeat it to man. Then they kissed hands and died together.

Jordan Luke Gage, West End leading man and writer of this new musical, found this story in Bristol Archives and here he spreads it further. His love for it is evident in every scene. Redcliffe is clearly a deeply personal act of reclamation, an attempt to give names, faces, interiority and tenderness to two men history recorded primarily as criminals. That impulse is honourable, and the show that has resulted is often genuinely moving. But it is also a show that, in softening certain truths, may inadvertently diminish the very gravity it is trying to honour.

The production at Southwark Playhouse Borough, directed by Paul Foster, uses the traverse space with considerable intelligence. Andrew Exeter‘s set is spare and evocative, built around sea crates that shift and reconfigure throughout to suggest alehouses, hillsides and courtrooms, grounding us always in the physical textures of a port city.

Alastair Penman‘s sound design is particularly effective in the opening minutes: you feel the salt air before a word is spoken. A LED light band running the length of the ceiling, textured like rough water or cracked stone, does a great deal of atmospheric work throughout, and Matt Hockley‘s lighting is consistently accomplished. The orchestrations, by Ben Tomalin and Ben Ferguson, deserve particular praise. They are rich and layered, and serve the drama without overwhelming it.

Jordan Luke Gage plays William with evident personal investment, and Daniel Krikler brings a sailor’s ease to Richard. The relationship between the two men is convincing, and the scenes in which it develops carry the show’s emotional core. Rebecca Lock as Mother earns the biggest laughs of the evening with excellent comic timing, her down-to-earth Bristol energy a welcome contrast to the mounting dread. The mother and daughter pairing, though not part of the historical record, adds levity and a strand of romantic interest that helps pace the first act.

The church scene is among the best in the show. The hymn-setting is beautiful, and the confusion and anguish of men asking why God might have made them as they are lands with real power. It is the kind of moment that justifies the whole enterprise.

There are moments where the production does not yet fully serve the material. The newspaper scenes, designed to establish the legal and social reality facing Arnold and Critchard, feel somewhat forced as a device. Interestingly, the show finds a better solution of its own later: the death of a former boyfriend conveys the stakes of their situation with far more dramatic immediacy than any headline. The lyric writing, too, is uneven; many rhymes are serviceable rather than inspired, and occasionally a forced rhyme tips into the unfortunate, pulling focus at precisely the moments when the drama asks for unselfconscious feeling. The traverse configuration is well chosen for this material, but the blocking in some scenes is occassionally awkward.

The deeper question concerns the show’s relationship to historical truth. The real Richard Arnold was a man of around sixty, a Londoner of substance who had lived in good repute for many years. William Critchard was a young footman of about twenty-four, from the west of England. Baber, the Swan’s landlord, spied on them in a back room and reported them to the authorities. They were arrested in August 1752, tried, and executed over a year later in September 1753. During their imprisonment, they were visited by several clergymen. They refused throughout to name any accomplices.

The show makes William younger still and reimagines Richard as a sailor, which is an understandable dramatic simplification. More significantly, the warm and sustaining family around William, while dramatically appealing and offering Rebecca Lock her finest material, raises difficult questions. The historical record gives us no evidence of how Critchard’s family responded. What we do know is that in 1752, for a family to stand publicly alongside a man convicted of sodomy was not merely emotionally difficult but economically and socially ruinous. The unconditional love the show presents is, of course, what we might hope for then and now. But its presence without complication may inadvertently suggest that the world these men navigated was less hostile than it truly was, and in doing so risks diminishing precisely the courage and the tragedy that makes their story worth telling.

The ending, however, is powerful and earns its emotion honestly. When the cast step out of period, speaking in their own voices and holding the artefacts of the real history, the accumulated weight of what has been performed lands hard. The audience on the night were visibly moved, and rightly so.

Redcliffe is a show of real ambition and genuine heart, asking important questions about which stories get told and who gets to tell them. Jordan Luke Gage has written and performed something courageous, and this production gives it a staging that, at its best, is genuinely beautiful. The reservations are worth voicing not to diminish the achievement, but because this story is important enough to deserve the fullest possible reckoning with its truth. There is a very fine show in here, and further development will only strengthen it.

Two men history recorded as criminals. Redcliffe gives them names, faces and tenderness. The impulse is honourable, even if it sometimes imagines a kinder world than the one they inhabited.

Redcliffe runs at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 4 July 2026.

All images: Pamela Raith

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