RADIANT BOY

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★½

“There are some neat, if underplayed, genre twists.”

In its own publicity, Radiant Boy was described by one cast member as “a queer coming-of-age meets The Exorcist via A Taste of Honey”.

That’s a tall order, cramming in a range of genres into a tight turn-around play. It also foresees the fault lines.

It’s 1983. After an unexplained episode at a music academy in London, trainee vocalist Russell (Stuart Thompson) abruptly leaves and returns to his childhood home in a post-industrial town in the North East. Awaiting him is Maud (Wendy Nottingham), his judgmental, curtain-twitching, pass-ag mother.

“It’s happening again,” he announces on his return.

Temperatures drop, bulbs crackle and fail, and he speaks with knowledge of events he’s never witnessed. There is even the suggestion of stigmata.

Maud turns to a priest named Father Miller (Ben Allen), who practises a fringe spiritual therapy he calls psychodivinity.

The substance of the play, therefore, is a series of probing sessions, rituals and cleansings, during which some of the truth behind Russell’s breakdown begins to emerge, including an intense bond he shared with another student, Steph (Renée Lamb), who prowls outside.

Here’s the problem.

There is no menace or atmosphere. Consequently, the cast suffers from a lack of conviction in the material.

The spirit (whose occupation of Russell is never fully explained) is that of Steph, the live-wire, fast-gabbing dancing queen. She is an absolute blast. So what Russell brings home is a friend from school, and the demonic possession is a playdate.

The priest is less an exorcist warring against the forces of evil than a plumber clearing a stubborn blockage in the downpipe.

The acting is technically great – Stuart Thompson as Russell is solid as a moody young man with mummy issues; Nottingham is suitably waspish and disappointed – but the production, under Júlia Levai’s underpowered direction, runs at a perpetual simmer when what is required is some welly, some oomph, some sense of true abyss-staring jeopardy.

Other minor horrors are suggested but never explored or resolved: Father Miller may have malign intentions or Russell’s homosexuality might be a factor. (Much is made of Russell’s queer identity in the programme notes, less so in the actual play.) The folkloric ghost of a young boy in the neighbourhood is raised then dumped. Religion and the nature of evil is surprisingly absent as key talking points.

The staging doesn’t help. The front room that is the centre of the action is initially shrouded in net curtains which are thankfully removed. However, the stanchions remain, and the audience feels fenced off from the actors. As a result, the lingering artificial cube of a set manages to be both too big and too insular at the same time.

There is, at the heart of the story, an intriguing idea. There are some neat, if underplayed, genre twists. Nancy Netherwood is a writer with huge potential, and she produces a script that is crisp, elegant and technically adept. But the play is ambivalent about its subject matter, too prissy to roll up its sleeves and state its case.

In short, the production is haunted by the ghost of the spectacle it might have been.

RADIANT BOY

Southwark Playhouse Borough

Reviewed on 23rd May 2025

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Olivia Spencer

Last ten shows reviewed at Southwark Playhouse venues:

RADIANT BOY

GHOSTS OF THE NEAR FUTURE at Edinburgh Festival Fringe

★★★

“performance art fans will be intrigued by Ghosts of the Near Future, and won’t be discouraged by the disparate and random elements in this show”

Ghosts of the Near Future promises “a show about extinctions, climatic, cultural, civilizational” in this newest offering by performance artists Emma Clark and PJ Stanley, aka emma + pj.
In sixty minutes, the audience in the Demonstration Room at Summerhall is treated to a rather muddled mashup of what is described as magic realism. Ghosts of the Near Future gives the impression of an incomplete encounter with too much popular American culture. The show is entertaining from moment to moment, but it’s a struggle to connect it with the theme of extinction on quite the scale suggested in its promotional material.

Extinction is a big theme in this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and with good reason. As scientific forecasts about species extinction, climate change, famine and plagues grow ever more disheartening, it’s important that artists tackle such big subjects. Art can illuminate data in ways that science cannot. What’s good about this piece by emma + pj is that, in a series of short scenes, Ghosts of the Near Future takes us out of the depressing reality of the near futures we are all facing, and presents us instead, with a dream of theirs. Spoiler alert: emma + pj’s is not any more cheerful, ultimately, but it’s a lot more fun to look at.

Clichés about the American West abound in Ghosts of the Near Future. Those who have been there can confirm that yes, it’s hot, and yes, it’s empty. If the point of all this is to show that the future of our planet may well look like Nevada, then yes, emma + pj are onto something. But how does the magic realism approach work with this? Why conjure up images of Las Vegas? To remind us that the showbiz glamour of this desert city is just a mirage? Is the point of this connection to make us realize that the achievements of our planet might one day been seen as just a magic trick, a dream? For generations of young people growing up amidst the ruins of the American Dream, I guess that’s true.

Ghosts of the Near Future is populated with white rabbits, magicians and showgirls. The imagination is caught, moment to moment, by enlarged images projected onto a screen, of plastic figures jumbled together in a glass tank; by pj’s sparkling magician’s jacket, or by emma dressed up as a showgirl holding a gasoline filled martini glass. The details can be captivating. Magic tricks do get performed, and there are some neat effects with cameras, lighting, sound and dry ice. Nice work by scenographer Georgie Hook and sound designer Patch Middleton.

All these details do not, in themselves, illuminate the theme of the show. Maybe the intent of Ghosts of the Near Future is to do this through playfulness, but the title of the show suggests otherwise. It is diverting to drift along with these likeable performers as they move through magic shows and various mythical encounters in the Nevada desert. As drifters know, however, such encounters are shot through with uncertainty. What did we really see?

Nevertheless, performance art fans will be intrigued by Ghosts of the Near Future, and won’t be discouraged by the disparate and random elements in this show. If that’s the case for you, go and soak up the experience, rather than trying to figure out its contribution to the subject of climate catastrophe.

Tag Archives: Patch Middleton

RADIANT BOY

★★½

Southwark Playhouse Borough

RADIANT BOY

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★½

“There are some neat, if underplayed, genre twists.”