Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Sarah Churm, Jamie De Courcey, Robert Demeger, Katrina Innes, Margot Leicester, Al Nedjari, David Ricardo-Pearce, Beatriz Romilly.
When is a murder not murder? It seems in the world of post First World War senselessness and when all those involved and affected by a loss of someone much loved, it can be easier to brush the whole sordid affair under the carpet.
In W. Somerset’s Maugham’s look at the thought of suicide, damaged humanity and repressed sexuality in The Sacred Flame at The Playhouse Theatre, it can be easily overlooked that the play, for its time, dealt with issues not really given credence in the same morally repressive British outlook on how women look at their lives and loves in the hang up from Victorian and Edwardian society.
With a set that was disturbingly and interestingly stark and almost brilliantly white in texture, the cast stood out in glorious Technicolor in ways that may have been unimaginable when first written or dramatised. It was this stark set that gave also the thought to the plight of Maurice Tabret, played by Jamie De Courcey. As his room was more in keeping of a cell in which he was locking himself away in. It was a magnificent piece of set design in which to urge the audience to think of the modern day equivalent in which some disabled people find themselves in.
Whilst fellow writer Agatha Christie was making her mark on the world of crime writing, it was rare for her to present a murder mystery in such a way that it focused sharply on the thought of the deceased and how it affected the women surrounding the body.
As W. Somerset Maugham was incredibly adept at showing in his writing, he could show women at their incredible best and also at their disturbing worst. The three women in this performance covered every facet of female sexuality, from repressed and honour bound, to pity and through to realising the folly of not following their heart. What each woman had though, was the love of one man at the heart of their emotions and in Sarah Churm as Nurse Wayland and the excellent Margot Leicester as Mrs Tabret, there could be no better and outstanding actors in getting this dichotomy in female gender studies across to an audience.
The Sacred Flame is a welcome return to national consciousness and to the stage of one of the best writers of the 20th century in this production by the English Touring Theatre.
Ian D. Hall