Burke & Hare – New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich

Picture: Will Green Photography

Burke & Hare continues at the New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich until 21 May 2022.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

The passing of time – nearly 200 years – has apparently deemed it acceptable for the 16 murders committed by Edinburgh-based rogues William Burke and William Hare to be fair game for comedy. Burke & Hare the film, starring Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis, came and went in 2010 and now the same infamous surname/ampersand combo is entertaining audiences at Ipswich’s New Wolsey, having premiered at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury.

The physical tomfoolery, puns and fourth wall-breaking asides come blood thick and adrenaline fast in Tom Wentworth’s new version of a play originally created by Jenny Wren Productions. However, carefully handled changes of mood in dialogue and music provide a steady reminder of the gravity of Burke and Hare’s evil deeds.

Ah, the music. We get lock-tight harmonies from the multi-instrumental cast of three (Hayden Wood as Burke, others; James Mack as Hare, others; Josie Dunn as Mrs Hare, others), but not quite enough songs to make this bona fide musical theatre. Shame, because as with Abigail Pickard Price’s direction, the folksy tunes we do hear are highly inventive and affecting. More please!

Also slightly on the thin side, it feels, is some form of straight-forward narrative to help chart Burke and Hare’s grisly deeds. The play makes you fact-hungry, but instead it majors (hilariously, so it happens) on what the central figures are like rather what they do, especially in the case of William Burke, who pays the ultimate price for their crimes while Hare turns King’s Evidence. With a pinch of Jim Carrey in his expressions, Wood turned in a magnetic and agile comic performance, Burke’s slimy charm and malevolence a joy to behold.

Between them, Wood, Mack and Dunn play more than 30 characters and three animals, the interplay and rapid-fire costume (Toots Butcher) changes impeccably formatted. Dunn’s vocal ticks, gurns and stage presence are a treasure, while Mack is a veritable force of nature in his many, many guises, in particular when imbuing Hare with a dastardly opportunism.

Dialect coach Elspeth Morrison more than earns her corn, especially through Dunn’s fine and versatile work. And a word too, for that most underrated of dismal, down-at-heel 19th century afflictions: the theatrical cough. Several of Burke and Hare’s victims are stricken with influenza before being murdered and sold to anatomist Robert Knox, and Wood, Mack and Dunn have perfected the rare art of the phlegm-fuelled guttural throat clearance. Sideline careers in cough sweet adverts are assured.

‘Dem Bones’ and ‘Whisky in the Jar’ are two of the musical highlights, and appropriately, Burke & Hare concludes with a mournful piano ditty as the courtroom hear of the horrors perpetrated by the pair. Their fate includes theatrical immortality, and this interpretation is unquestionably up there with the best.

Ben Sharratt