Radiant Boy | Southwark Playhouse Borough

A dark room. Two actors partially obscured from view inside a gauze-swathed box. An eerie voice singing a folk song. This sets the scene for Nancy Netherwood’s play Radiant Boy: A Haunting, directed by Júlia Levai and produced by Cloudburst in its world premiere at Southwark Playhouse Borough.

The play centres around Russell (Stuart Thompson), a young singer returned home to the North East from his conservatoire in London with newly-bleached hair and a mysterious Voice (Renée Lamb) haunting him. 

Russell’s mother Maud (Wendy Nottingham) has arranged for Father Miller (Ben Allen) to perform an exorcism, and this forms the thrust of the narrative, as the priest attempts to tease out Russell’s story and also to exorcise The Voice.

The mystery unfolds slowly, and much of the first act is simply devoted to building atmosphere and tension, with Patch Middleton’s haunting soundscapes and Elinor Peregrin’s musical coordination working well to this effect, while Lucia Sánchez Roldan’s flickering lighting also puts the audience in the heart of a ghost story.

Tomas Palmer’s set, as well as Peregrin’s soundtrack of Ultravox and Yazoo, places the piece firmly in its 1980s setting. Once the gauze is drawn back in the opening scene, a living room is revealed, complete with chintz curtains and a record player used to weave music naturally into the story.

The play is delicately crafted, with Netherwood’s dialogue dancing around the central themes of queerness, faith and self-discovery in ways which often pose more questions than they answer. Thompson and Nottingham perfectly capture the challenging parent-child dynamic, seesawing between love and frustration as they fail to communicate the real issues at hand.

Allen also gives a strong performance, injecting Father Miller with righteous passion and just a hint of menace, while Lamb literally haunts the stage for much of the piece, silently reacting to the unfolding action. Lamb has a dual role in the play, effortlessly switching from background to foreground to play Russell’s music school friend Steph, an important catalyst in his unravelling and in unlocking some of the mysteries at the heart of the piece. 

Radiant Boy is at its most powerful when the sizzling undercurrent of tension explodes to the surface, as happens several times through the piece. Though there are content warnings for blood and vomit, these are not overused, with much of the horror in the piece firmly psychological.

A slow-burning mystery with a powerful climax, Radiant Boy is an important exploration of queerness, faith and family and the complicated ways in which they intersect.

Radiant Boy: A Haunting runs at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 14th June.

Tickets and More Information

★★★★☆ (4*)

Gifted tickets in return for an honest review | Photography by Olivia Spencer