Writer: Nancy Netherwood
Director: Júlia Levai
Nancy Netherwood’s Radiant Boy is a masterpiece – a spell-binding drama with a powerfully evocative atmosphere.
The play begins in mystery. The set – a triumph of expressive minimalism by Tomas Palmer – is simple. Walls of gauze afford glimpses of two characters inside a room on a stark, wintry night. Outside, a woman wanders, singing snatches of old hymns and folk ballads. When the gauze is pulled away, we are attuned to the room’s boundaries. Within is Russell, a young music student, returned home from London, in a state of nameless distress. His mother Maud stands tight-lipped and brittle, exuding exasperation. There’s a sense of something having gone deeply wrong in the past that is haunting both of them.
Maud has summoned a priest, believing her son to be possessed. The subtlety of Netherwood’s writing lies in her restraint. It’s what is not said that becomes increasingly powerful. Music and sound speak louder than words. Yazoo’s haunting Only You and Ultravox’s Vienna not only place the drama in the early 1980s, but also suggest a wistful melancholy. When Maud sneers at Russell’s newly blonde hair, we assume he has discovered he is gay. But Radiant Boy doesn’t follow the well-trodden path of the coming-out story. The root of Russell’s fears seems to lie deeper.
At the heart of Russell’s inner world is music. His vinyl CDs lie scattered on the carpet, and his childhood love for church music becomes gradually apparent in subtle arrangements of fragments of great choral pieces. The production’s astonishing soundscape, designed by Patch Middleton and Elinor Peregrin, creates a fusion of this music, the literal blasting of the growing storm and the deeper, more uncanny sounds suggestive of intense inner disturbance.
But the soundscape never crosses the border into cheap horror. Neither does Netherwood’s priest, Father Miller, ever come a simple caricature. He is no ranting demagogue. Rather, he is a kindly figure who passionately believes that he can exorcise Russell’s demons. But there is a sense that he, too, is haunted. Again, the writing here is superb, always evocative rather than bluntly expository. For Russell himself, the haunting is by The Voice – the expressive singing of his friend and soul mate, Steph. Something has happened between them, and this becomes part of the play’s underlying mystery.
At the heart of the drama is the exorcism, itself a haunting affair. Somehow, under Júlia Levai’s expert direction, and the faultless acting of the cast, we may wonder what it is we have witnessed. Wendy Nottingham’s Maud is a model of uptight respectability who only gradually discovers understanding for her son. Renée Lamb is superb as joyful fellow-student Steph and as the mysterious figure of the singing woman. Ben Allen gives Father Miller great complexity. But it is Stuart Thompson’s compelling performance as Russell that lies at the heart of the play. Thompson finds subtle variety in his expressions of fear, numbness and anger. But above all, it is his portrayal of Russell’s depthless loneliness which gives Radiant Boy its particular note of sorrow and compassion.
It’s all the more astonishing that this beautifully and subtly crafted play is Nancy Netherwood’s debut.
Runs until 14 June 2025
