Gormenghast

Down a winding lane just off the Royal Mile, hidden in the heart of Edinburgh, a gothic church has been transformed into the world of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast by alternative student theatre company Paradok.

The stage version of Peake’s post-war fiction monolith, adapted by John Constable and directed by Hamish Kallin, tells the story of the crumbling castle Gormenghast and its inhabitants. Like some kind of hellish Downton Abbey the play shows us both upstairs and downstairs.

We meet the Earl of Groan and his family, who have ruled Gormenghast for thousands of years, their lives ruled by obscure rituals and their central motto, “No change.” We also meet the servants, who break their backs in the subterranean hell of the cellars and kitchens working for the aristocrats. The Groans have a son, Titus (Jonathan Blaydon), who is the only heir to Gormenghast. Titus, caught up in the round of pointless rituals, is desperate to escape but doesn’t know how.

His parents (Dylan Read and Bex Bowen) ignore him, more interested in talking cats and libraries, his mad aunts (Saskia Longeretti and Augusta Charlton) are locked away and his sister (Darla Eno) is living in a fantasy world. However, down below the kitchen boy Steerpike (Billy Watt) is getting ambitions beyond his place, ambitions which will lead to murder, revolution, fire, insanity, and the eventual fall of the House of Groan.

This production is quite unlike any other, building a surreal, baroque and terrifying world through incredibly evocative and original costume, sound and projections.

Without obvious political statement the play confronts us with the pure horror of a society where there is “no change,” where privilege is so entrenched it has got into the bones of the castle itself. This appalling vision makes a moral point that hits you like a blow to the stomach.

The performances of the huge cast are uniformly excellent, giving believable flesh and teeth to characters who could easily turn into caricatures, and they fill the space in a way that make the audience feel they are not observing the castle, but are deep inside it. Gormenghast is a production which, with dark humour and brilliant staging, manages to transport us to a dizzying other world.