Writer: Jacob Marx Rice
Director: Victoria Hadel
Jacob Marx Rice’s new play, Ripper rather straightforwardly retells the story of the most famous serial murderer, this time through the eyes of an ambitious female reporter, desperate to achieve recognition in London in the 1880s. Upsettingly, in a 2024 marketplace that has become bloated with true crime adjacent media, Ripper is an ungainly and unsophisticated production that ultimately fails to treat its subject matter with respect.
That the Jack the Ripper story is famously unsolved is clearly foundational to its allure. A shifting, un-human presence, obsessively stalking the streets of Victorian London and enacting gruesome crimes against sex workers excites our basest human interest in sex and death. Indeed, nobody will fail to recognise how the desire to confront and dissect the barbarity of human behaviour is exploited by true crime punditry to this day. The play makes a ham-fisted attempt to suggest that the contemporary media sensationalism surrounding the Whitechapel murders is directly complicit in the crimes. Despite this, the play lacks the self-awareness to recognise its own role in perpetuating such gleeful sensationalism.
The tone of the production is established early, with the unwise decision to greet audience members with cast members in character. Cheery cockney sex workers chat up the audience, while a leather-aproned man jokes, ‘I hope you’re good at solving mysteries!’ The effect is of a fairground attraction, designed to titillate, and sits uneasily beside the heavier subject matter.
Fundamentally, Marx Rice’s story is both implausible and one-dimensional. There is insufficient nuance in the writing to partner the hefty subject matter. Meanwhile, the play feels disappointingly needless because it fails to challenge the audience in a meaningful way.
A particularly frustrating exchange between Gillian Spender, a middle-class female reporter, the first of her kind, and Mary Jane Kelly, the Ripper’s final victim, who was living in poverty and working as a prostitute, attempts to address the dangers inherent to working women, but is too simplistic to offer anything of substance. To a 2024 audience who have the benefit of Hallie Rubenhold’s work contextualising the lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims, plus the extensive writing of sex workers and activists (e.g. Revolting Prostitutes by Juno Mac and Molly Smith), there is no excuse for writing about victims of violent crime with such limited scope.
The decision to keep set design minimal works in the play’s favour, as we rapidly shift between the streets of Whitechapel and newspaper offices. Outsized props and unsophisticated costuming distract from decent but unsteady performances. Gemma Tubbs is well cast as the intrepid female reporter, though she is underserved by the one-note writing. In the ensemble, Michael Ross as Detective Abberline and others provide a comforting presence onstage.
Runs until 3 August 2024
Camden Fringe runs until 25 August 2024
