Review: THE GRIM, Southwark Playhouse

There’s nothing like a good horror to keep you warm in the wintertime, but you will find no such thing at Southwark Playhouse. The Grim is a badly paced, maladroit, wannabe absurdist comic thriller that tries too hard to ease its nonexistent suspense with shallow laughter.

Mid-60s, London has been seized by a series of murders. Shaun has taken over his family’s funeral home with plenty of imposter syndrome due to his father’s brilliance. His assistant, Robert, is all over the place. Chaos ensues when they take in the corpse of the most violent criminal in Britain, Jackie “The Guillotine” Gallagher.

This Fringe success falls flat in the capital. Edmund Morris writes an eclectic script, but director Ben Woodhall fails to weave it into a compelling sequence of atmospheric shifts. The comedy overpowers the terror, and the relentless squibs grow tiresome. Morris takes the role of Shaun with conviction. He has excellent banter with Louis Davison (Robert), who freaks out with terrified passion once the events kick in.

Their characters live at the two opposite poles of a strict spectrum: Shaun is all direct heartlessness; Robert is polite sympathy. The first, coarse and taunting, loves morbid talk; the other is an Irish Catholic lad who meddles with superstition and believes in the occult. They tease each other relentlessly, which provides some valuable quirky humour here and there, but the writing runs around in circles, getting lost in its never-ending gags and callbacks. 

The main issue, however, doesn’t fully lie in the performances or in the dialogue. The one-hour play is broken right in the middle by an unnecessary interval that interrupts the only brief spell of tension in the production. The second half-hour picks up where we left, reiterating the superfluity of the act break.

Harry Carter completes the cast as the dead-ish murderer lying on the slab. Loud, beefy, and intimidating, there’s a Peaky Blinder-esque aura to him. Shaun and Robert are simply unequipped to handle such a strange situation, so they panic. It’s amusing, but not enough to save the show and turn it around. Morris seeks to give it a solid plot, but everything is too quick and underdeveloped. He gives Jackie a valid motive for the homicides and clears his name, but it’s a plain and utterly predictable denouement.

With very little dramaturgical sophistication in the storytelling, the supernatural element is to be taken at face value. Robert explains the lore behind “the grim” and other unexplained happenings, but it doesn’t come off as the scary story it could be. All in all, it’s severely underwhelming and undercooked

The Grim runs at Southwark Playhouse until 6 December.