Charlie's Dark Angel

A deep well in a remote house in Suffolk, old superstitions, a mysterious young woman from Odessa, ghosts, seductive paintings and demonic possession. The first part of this debut play from James Christopher contains all the ingredients for a great kooky thriller. It’s just a pity that the finale goes a bit ‘Midsummer Murders’.

There’s a touch of Pinter’s obscure subtext and high tension in the early parts of ‘Charlie’s Dark Angel’. Hapless salesman Charlie rents out his Suffolk family home to friendly, rich Eric, who has, he says, a prostitute called Ella, secretly smuggled through Europe from Odessa in the car.  It doesn’t seem weird to Charlie that Eric recognises him from their time at a stuffy boarding school. Or that he knows the poems Charlie wrote as a 17-year-old (published in school pamphlet ‘The Raven’) by heart. To the unwitting Charlie, it’s all an astonishing coincidence.

As Charlie, his wife Susan, Eric and Ella begin to get to know each other, Charlie and Ella get close. Eric, who his father had medically ‘treated’ for his homosexuality at school, gets a little more erratic, being absent for days, while relaying stories about Ella that seem far-fetched. In what feels like a dodgy Faustian pact, Eric commissions Charlie to write new work – despite Charlie not having written since he was a teenager. The air in the old house becomes heavy with suggestion and Charlie’s straightforward wife is acutely suspicious.

Christopher is good with dialogue, and the spine-tingling moments are littered with refreshingly sharp humour. It’s also fun to spot his numerous gothic horror references (Eric has more than a touch of Dracula about him). He also directs, and this is a taut, well-paced production with an excellent cast, led by a nuanced Ben Porter as Charlie and an excellent professional debut from Phoebe Pryce.

It’s just a pity that, while the tension is often razor-sharp, the denouement stomps on the delicately constructed build-up. A disappointing finish to a promising start.