Theatre Review

Avant-Garde Nonsense Causes a Riot

The theatre-going public of London should be thankful at the news that there are to be no more performances of “Carcosa – or the Queen and the Stranger”, a “Fantasy in two acts” which had its disastrous premiere last night at the Scala Theatre.

The play, written as a first foray into drama by popular novelist Talbot Estus, and performed by the well-regarded amateur theatre company known as ‘the Group’ was, in the opinion of this reviewer, tedious, confusing and extraordinarily pretentious. The audience seem to have agreed, and in some cases to have found its dreary demands upon their time quite intolerable, as upon the final curtain a riot broke out in the theatre, resulting in several arrests and at least one badly broken nose.

The play, for what its worth, focussed on the royal family of an undefined alien city, and their squabbles over the succession, and the arrival of a mysterious masked stranger who apparently was supposed to symbolise some concept or other. The work ‘climaxed’, if that is the word, with the ludicrous arrival of ’The King in Yellow’, a demon-king character, played (badly) by Estus himself, whose motives and significance were quite lost on the poor audience.

The cast, it must be said, did the best they could with the poor material, and special mention must be made of Hannah Keith, who in the role of Queen Cassilda managed to create a few moments of genuine interest in a sea of pointless dreariness.

There remains hope for ‘the Group’, but little for Estus. Let us hope he returns to fiction, and leaves drama for those more suited to the task.