Compared to Bedlam, as seen on the Globe stage last year in Nell Leyshon’s play of the same name, Broadmoor seems a holiday retreat. Instead of leeches and laxatives, inmates are treated with art and understanding, even love.
These two parlour plays – the thinking man’s melodramas – complete Steve Hennessy’s ‘Lullabies of
Broadmoor’ series at the Finborough, in which exhumed medical cases are given posthumous examinations. While tenderly empathetic and infused with atmosphere, both are so gentle that they’re in danger of leaving little impression.
‘Venus of Broadmoor’ is the crispest. Chocolate Cream Poisoner Christiana Edmunds is an intoxicating presence as played by Violet Ryder, whose hollow eyes suddenly twinkle in flirtation. And Hennessy draws sharp parallels between lunacy and love.
Patricidal artist Richard Dadd (Chris Bianchi) becomes a delusional schizophrenic with a specious relationship to myth in ‘The Demon Box’. Though Hennessy deftly threads ideas of time and liberty, it’s sluggish and fuzzy, only finding punch as it ends.
The one constant is a biased narrator, asylum guard John Coleman, delicately played by Chris Donnelly as a yardstick of social norms. Well-meaning but only human, his own cracks prove sanity a concept without instance in the outside world.