Gabrielle Ketley reviews the latest Torchwood release.
As the Torchwood: Monthly Range approaches its final bow, David Llewellyn’s Torchwood: Curtain gives us a creepy, campy romp in a theatrical setting, with equally theatrical characters.
Many years ago, the Palace Theatre burned down on the opening night of ‘Mephisto’, a retelling of Faustus that featured “a mixture of classic texts, improvisation and bollocks”. Now, the stars of the show are gathered together for a one night performance, to a one-man audience.
Dermot Lacey’s (Cyril Nri) life has gone downhill ever since the fire that reduced the theatre and his career to ashes. Whereas his former leading lady, Mathilde Balfour (Sarah Douglas), has done marginally better as a jobbing actress, with the odd bit role on Casualty, it is Roger Cartney (Robert Bathurst) who has made the big time, a fact that he doesn’t hesitate rubbing in the faces of his former co-stars as he swoops up to the theatre in a limo, with a list of rules about who is allowed to look him in the eye, and how much it will cost to get a photo of him (smiles cost extra).
Their audience is a single man, calling himself Bilis Manger (Colin Ryan), whose motivations are gradually revealed to be as mysterious to himself as they are to cast and audience alike.
Roger, Mathilde and Dermot are as flamboyant, posturing and insincere as could be wished of a cast of theatricals, and it is the interplay between them, with its layers of affection, resentment, jealousy and nostalgia, that gives Curtain a lot of its complexity and all of its humour.
As much as Mathilde has a point when she says “we’re actors, we’re all terrible people”, she’s no less wrong when she declares Roger the worst of the lot, and Bathurst is deliciously repulsive as the unapologetically obnoxious and ruthless celebrity. Sarah Douglas portrays Mathilde with flair, fun, and discrete intelligence, whereas Cyril Nri balances both the cringe and the pathos with his perpetually self-pitying Dermot. Stepping in as Bilis after the loss of Murray Melvin in 2023, Colin Ryan has big shoes to fills, and he manages to play “Bilis” as both enigmatic and subtly tragic.
Appropriately for a play all about performance, the line between what’s real and what’s not increasingly begins to blur, as masks are dropped, worlds collide, and remnants of the past seep into the future. This confusion creates a beautifully creepy and sinister atmosphere, which keeps the intrigue going right until the end. Admittedly, nothing happens in the plot that cannot be predicted, but Faustus is a classic for a reason, and the simplicity of the plot allows for the characterisation and the atmosphere to really shine.
Torchwood: Curtain is available on CD or as a download from
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