The Grim – Old Red Lion Theatre, London

Writer: Edmund Morris

Director: Ben Woodhall

With two undertakers, a supernatural story and a bag of sweets, Edmund Morris’ play The Grim has all the ingredients of a sitcom episode and for much of its 60-minute running time, that is exactly what the audience gets with lashings of black comedy and some old-fashioned, high stakes farce as the hapless central characters get themselves into a bit of a pickle. Arriving at the Old Red Lion Theatre following a run at the Edinburgh Festival, The Grim also dabbles with the supernatural but forgets some of the plot points it has started in favour of a grittier crime narrative, leaving the play a little confused about its identity.

At the Bethnal Green branch of undertakers Mallory & Sons, proprietor Sean and his assistant Rob banter away as they prepare their customers for the afterlife. But as a practising Catholic, Rob senses occult activity, hearing voices and experiencing paranormal activity that he is afraid represents the lingering souls of evil. While cynic Sean dismisses Rob’s fears, reading about a local serial killer in the newspapers ensures they both get a fright.

Morris’s play is most successful when it leans into the darker comedy and the heightened everyday reality of life in the undertakers, and there is considerable mileage in the contrasting characterisation offered by Rob and Sean. Half the play focuses on their double act and there are lots of hints about the origins of their relationship and their respective histories that The Grim sadly never follows up on.

Sean, we learn, inherited the business from his late father and implies he would be disappointed by the pace of work while Rob’s knowledge of the macabre points to a far greater interest in the boundaries of death than the story eventually offers. How did these two men come to be working together, what makes Sean so certain there is no afterlife and how does Rob’s religion interact with his experience of seances and the doom-laden death of family members? The eventual conclusion doesn’t pay off our character investment or what is a great chalk-and-cheese relationship.

So, while The Grim promises supernatural goings on, these don’t fully tie into what happens next, getting sidetracked by a local crime story about Jackie “The Guillotine” Gallagher (Harry Carter) and potential police corruption. This all takes place in a second ‘episode,’ the latter half of the play where the tone veers wildly between its comedy origins and the world of this violent man. Morris never explains how Gallagher happens to be in Mallory Undertakers or what that means, relying on increasing the hysteria to find an ending but moving away from the central characterisation to achieve it.

There is lots to like in The Grim, Morris (Sean) and Louis Davison (Rob) rub along nicely as semi-antagonists trapped in a small world together, the very essence of sitcom, and there are certainly greater recurring possibilities for these characters. This edition is probably three episodes worth of plot though and for them to have a future, its character investment rather than plot that has to be the end point.

Runs Until 18 January 2025