Review: Dark of the Moon, Charing Cross Theatre ★★★

A UK premiere splitting bluegrass humans from rock witches, with more craft than cohesion

Appalachian folklore doesn’t get much of an outing on West End adjacent stages, so there’s something to be said for Charing Cross Theatre taking a punt on this UK premiere. Dark of the Moon began life as a 1942 University of Iowa play spun out of the old ballad “Barbara Allen”, and has been rewritten more than once since (a 1948 West End version was directed by a twenty four year old Peter Brook, of all people). This version, with a book by Jonathan Prince and songs by Lindy Robbins, Dave Bassett and Steve Robson, splits its sound world neatly in two: the human townsfolk sing country and bluegrass, the witches and conjour folk up in the Smoky Mountains sing rock. It’s a smart idea on paper. In the room, it doesn’t always land.

The plot is simple enough. Barbara Allen (Lauren Jones) falls for John (Glenn Adamson), a witch boy who has bargained to become human so he can marry her. The trouble is the marriage happens almost as soon as they’ve met, so there’s no time for the creepiness of the set up, a man who has watched her in her dreams, to settle before we’re at the altar. I wanted more space between “he’s been haunting your sleep” and “let’s get married”, because that gap is where the tension should live.

Adamson’s John has an interesting problem baked into the writing: he’s meant to be discovering what it means to be human, but the show skips the ingenue stage entirely, so his lack of knowledge and his sudden competence never quite match up. It’s the Edward Scissorhands set up without the charm phase where he learns the rules of the world he’s entered. The curse itself works a bit like The Little Mermaid in reverse: this time it’s the human who’s in peril if the bargain breaks, not the magical outsider, which is a nice twist that the show doesn’t do quite enough with.

The witches only partially worked for me. Jordan Broatch comes closest to making the device sing, conniving and flirtatious and dangerous all at once, with a real sense of play about them. But that isn’t matched consistently across the coven: Josie Benson‘s Conjur Woman uses her head and her eyes to do as much work as her voice, while Gary Turner‘s Conjur Man, by contrast, felt far less commanding, never quite matching her strength. Al Knott and Appolilly Szwarc, as two of the other witches, seemed to be working without the same clarity of direction, and I found their characterisation hard to read at points. Taken together, the witches never quite cohere into the unified, unsettling presence the show needs them to be.

Georgie Rankcom‘s staging keeps a great deal going on at all times, and that’s my main quarrel with the evening: there’s so much background business, so much activity from ensemble figures around the edges of scenes, that it kept pulling my eye away from whoever was meant to be the focus. It’s the kind of overstuffed staging where you leave feeling you missed things simply because there was too much competing for attention.

Libby Todd‘s set design has a similar problem of ambition outrunning judgement. The set itself is nicely weathered, all the right texture for a rural Appalachian town, but a pergola meant to anchor one key scene wobbled distractingly every time anyone touched it. More frustratingly, the design needed to carve out space above the stage for the witches to observe the humans, and in doing so it cramped the main playing area badly. With the full company on stage, it felt genuinely overcrowded.

The costumes have the opposite problem to the set: where the set is appropriately careworn, the humans’ clothes are too clean for people meant to be scraping a living in the mountains, and the witches’ outfits aren’t celestial or otherworldly enough to suggest they belong to a different order of being at all. They gave off more of a whiff of rubbish dump scavengers, which rather undercut the idea that an eternity spent with them might be tempting.

The sound mix didn’t do the show any favours either; there were points where dialogue and lyrics were simply hard to catch. And some of the lyric writing doesn’t help its own cause, with rhymes as thin as “life’s a bitch, I’m a witch” landing more as unintentional comedy than the ominous note it’s presumably reaching for.

None of this is to say the evening is without craft, the witches’ numbers in particular have a real charge to them, but by the end I found I simply didn’t care enough about Barbara Allen and John to be moved by what happens to them, and that’s a serious shortfall for a show built entirely around their romance.

Dark of the Moon runs until 8 August at Charing Cross Theatre.

Photography credit: Thomas Bowles Photography

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