Normal
The Brewery Theatre
November 11-22

By Sophia Lomax

Look away sharpish if you’re of a delicate disposition. Why? Because the all-new and sweetly marvellous Brewery Theatre is showing a play that’ll scare at least one of your socks off and revolve your stomach right around, that’s why.

Anthony Neilson’s Normal rips open the innards of one Peter Kurten, based on the real-life 1920s German known as  – hint, hint – the Dusseldorf Ripper,  someone for whom a predilection for indiscriminate murder and generous bouts of destructive mayhem finally get him executed.

An unnervingly naive lawyer, Justus Wehner, is drafted in to defend Kurten, who we meet in prison awaiting trial for nine grotesque murders and heaven only knows how many assorted attacks on escapee victims.

But Wehner fails so spectacularly in his bid to discover a reasonable defence for Kurten’s behaviour that he finds himself pitched headlong into a universe where so-called normal laws of morality don’t apply and where innocent bystanders – him, for instance – are swallowed wholesale by Kurten’s single-minded bloodlust.

Wehner twigs almost from the outset that Kurten is not mad but simply a monster. Accordingly, the set is littered with two-foot high scissors, enormous, foil-bright hammers and sinister protrusions of hardware to back up the grisly facts of his frenetic life.

The play is improbably funny, with Kurten describing Jack the Ripper as ‘a man after my own heart’. Imaginary courtroom scenes are handled like a weightless script-soufflé, thanks largely to a trio of actors in tip-top form: Kate Kordel, Oliver Millingham and Michael Mitcham – who surely must have one of the noblest-looking profiles in the world for playing morally-tortured chaps in the legal profession.

And Millingham’s Peter Kurten is charismatic and rapacious, matched by Kordel as his luscious, misery-laden wife, replete with turn-‘o-the century stockings and violent-red lips.

Adapted stylishly from a production of two years ago by director Chris Loveless, characters shimmy erratically about, to background fairground music, like raindrops racing down a mouldering sash window; while bursts of cartoonishly splattery, bloodcurdling activity are spliced with menace-soaked longeurs.

There’s sex, of a sort you never want to mess with; there’s oodles of gore and, most of all, there’s a fine script handled with an all-round graceful touch rendering the violently unpalatable events horribly entertaining.

Catch it if you dare.

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