Jim Broadbent's most recent appearance at the National before Theatre of Blood was coincidentally also in a play that featured several elaborate and gruesome murders, The Pillowman. That is where the similarity ends since this play falls firmly into the boundaries of high camp despite the assurances from the programme that state the contrary. Broadbent stars as Edward Lionheart, a disaffected actor, a genius in his own opinion, overlooked for the Critics Circle Award of 1972 for performance of Shakespeare. Lionheart's revenge is to lure the seven critics responsible for the judging to an old theatre and exact a bloody revenge upon his detractors with the aid of a rag tag bunch of tramps.
The play is a staging of the 1973 film which starred Vincent Price as Lionheart and Diana Rigg as his daughter, played here by Rigg's real life daughter Rachael Stirling fitting perfectly into the role and providing an outstanding vamp like performance, one of two real stand outs in the production. It is a very mixed bag of outstanding set pieces, laugh out loud funny scenes and the completely tiresome and dull. It is hard to escape the fact that Jim Broadbent was so much better served by The Pillowman, there he relished his role each time I saw him perform. In Theatre of Blood he seems tired and perhaps already bored by the long Shakespearian speeches he is called upon to perform badly, staggering round the stage looking like a mixture of Frank N' Furter from the Rocky Horror Show and Dracula. One section, a flashback explaining his apparent suicide in front of the assembled critics, seemed to drag on for so long that my mind didn't just wander it went for a three mile walk. However it is not a completely wasted appearance in my opinion, there are glimpses of occasional relish, such as his appearance as a camp hairdresser or occasional comic looks to the audience which brought appreciative laughter and claps but they are few and far between.
The assembled critics are presented as stereotypes, the ambitious blonde, the middle aged alcoholic, the screaming old queen carrying round his pair of poodles. That is not to say there is not to be fun to be had with the actor's characterisations in the roles, Bette Bourne as the previously mentioned Queen is hilarious and the other stand out, it just shows the limits of this piece. It feels very two dimensional and does not manage to extract any emotional response except the joy of seeing the utterly over the top gore on stage. Blood doesn't just flow, it flies into the air and out towards the audience, the murders which are representations of the deaths from Shakespearian play are often fantastically funny to behold. There is a nod to relevance and meaning during a discussion of the running of the National Theatre but I think that the original material may have been better served by a 90 minute small scale production in an environment like The Venue, once home to Taboo, where some element of similar audience involvement might bring the piece to life. This is far from being the National Theatre's finest hour but I would recommend it to fans of gore, it is not often there is an attempt to transfer the genre from screen to stage and here at least those elements of the production work splendidly.
