Coram Boy

Coram Boy, adapted by Helen Edmundson from the novel by Jamila Gavin, is a Dickensian melodrama, a tale of brutal murder in the 18th Century told with a great deal of mournfully grotesque style punctuated with the magnificent music of Handel and Handelesque music by Adrian Sutton. We get lively schoolboys in chorus, dark pageantry and a totally predictable story: rich boy and poor boy want to be musicians (rich boy's aristocratic father objects). There is a black slave boy who is in danger, and a slimy evil-doer who kills babies (a vivid Bill Camp as the lowest of the low).

The set and costumes, by the very imaginative director Melly Still and Ti Green, the lighting by Paule Constable and Ed McCarthy, and the soaring Handel choruses provide the entertainment in the play.

Although Still is a brilliant director, and the performers give terrific personifications from character to caricature, the play itself, basically about the brutality meted out to the poor, is full of contrasting stimulants to our sensibilities, and ultimately sinks into bathos, which can be a bit alienating.