Radiant Boy – Southwark Playhouse Borough

Picture: Olivia Spencer

Radiant Boy continues at Southwark Playhouse Borough, London until 14 June 2025.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

During Nancy Netherwood’s hauntingly melancholy Radiant Boy, the prospect is raised that the act of exorcism was a Middle Ages form of what we now term psychotherapy. Depression and psychosis may be the results of chemical imbalances in the brain, but without the language and understanding of their origins, the Church of centuries ago ascribed mental ill health to the presence of demons.

That suggestion is posited by Ben Allen’s Father Miller, who has been called to a remote house in the north east of 1980s England to help Stuart Thompson’s Russell, who has been plagued all his life with some form of malign influence. At first, Miller’s ministrations take the form of talking therapies, examining Russell’s troubles through childhood and why they have resurfaced now, after the young man moved to London to study classical singing in a conservatoire.

Russell’s return is clearly a strained one, expertly played by tense scenes between Thompson and Wendy Nottingham as Maud, Russell’s mother. At first, this plays out with similar vibes as a freshly out and newly liberated gay man returning to a repressive family home. But sensitive writing and performance slowly reveal that more is going on, with supernatural happenings the reason Maud has called in Father Miller’s assistance.

The sense of claustrophobia is heightened by Tomás Palmer’s set, initially shrouded in a gauze cube that takes up the whole of the thrust area of the Southwark Playhouse’s Little space. Around that, Renée Lamb (a veteran of musicals including Six, Ain’t Misbehavin’ and many more) walks slowly, her a cappella voice delivering haunting renditions of folk songs.

As the gaze comes down to reveal Maud’s living room, Lamb continues her slow walk around the space, the personification of Russell’s haunted soul. She also occasionally steps into the space to perform flashbacks of the troubled young man’s time at music college. As fellow student Steph, her ebullient Scouser is a complete remove from the sombre, haunting presence she plays elsewhere.

Although Radiant Boy is not a musical, songs and singing are present throughout, from echoes of Russell’s early life as a boy member of the local church choir, to his love for early 1980s pop classics. Performed at a slow, mournful tempo, Yahoo’s ‘Only You’ proves to be a haunting accompaniment to the escalating sense of dread in one of the few performed songs.

Fans of supernatural horror on stage will appreciate the rising tensions throughout, although a shock at the end of Act I is curiously devoid of energy (perhaps as a result of the struggle to block the action so that it is visible at all angles). That is not to say the rest of the piece is focused on action – far from it. Director Júlia Levai keeps her actors’ movements thoughtful and deliberate, essential in the limited space but also effective in amplifying the sense of internal turmoil.

Anybody looking for a definitive answer of what – or who – is plaguing Russell might be disappointed. Just as those who believe in exorcism may differ about whether it is really about the purging the demons or is an early form of talking therapy developed in an age which didn’t understand the brain, the events of Radiant Boy are not clear-cut.

What is not in doubt is the quartets of strong performances, particularly Thompson and Lamb. The whole piece has a melancholic air, like the sound of a folk tune on the winter wind. Like such song, it is both beautiful and terrifying.

Scott Matthewman