Review by Simon Jenner, May 16th 2025
Most adaptations of books are deadly theatre. Very few take in the scope of the original. I can’t think of one who in some sense improves on it, if it’s a fine work of literature. Till now. Here’s an exception. The Department of Ulterior Motives adapts, perverts and remains faithful to G. K. Chesterton’s 1908 The Man Who Was Thursday, co-directed by writer Samuel Masters and Morgan Corby which plays at the Rotunda Bubble till May 17th, then 23rd, both at 20.00.
Photo Credit Samuel Masters
This extraordinary octet of players plus a hard-working stage manager Anna Young often recruited to the ranks, all apparate in Pierrot whiteface, mostly black attire and bizarre accretions including a Pinocchio nose on the conk of a swordsman in true Cyrano de Bergerac fashion. The quotable gestures from other works litter the stage and never even get in the way. They wink and move on. The Rotunda space allows wings and little else, though a few Bombs of varying makes, and rapid costume-changes supply the scenery.
They present what Chesterton described as “a nightmare’. Indeed the imagery and dream-like dusks of the settings, especially the beginning and end, lend a hallucinatory unreality that grows ever more gigantic in the original, which TDUM replicate: but more of that later.
Photo Credit Samuel Masters
Photo Credit Samuel Masters
There’s a new prelude. And it should be added that in the original no-one dies by explosion or any other means. Here it’s different. An agent codenamed Thursday of the Anarchist Council is planting a bomb. Commander Sunday whose face is never seen, assures her the gelatine is vegan and no animals were harmed in its making. Pity, as being non-animal gelatine it proves unstable and explodes. There’s a vacancy. It’s straight out of The Pink Panther.
Next there’s tweaking of the protagonist. In the original Gabriel Syme, an aspiring poet of law and order, meets anarchist poet Lucian Gregory, who does have a sister. Here, Lucian is removed and Rosamund Gregory (Ester Dracott, in a luminous performance pointed with wit and clarity) becomes the poet of order.
That’s also just after her house has been exploded, she finds no police are willing to help (wrong borough, or the event is past and she’s now homeless so not a householder, in the first crowd scene) and another policeman (Michael Grant) arrives: to recruit her as a poet with imagination, even if she’s ever completed a poem, to work undercover for the New Detective Corps and help defeat the looming anarchist threat.
Photo Credit Samuel Masters
Photo Credit Samuel Masters
Trace elements of Patrick Barlow’s 39 Steps and other such homages flicker across as first-rate physical theatre, but this ensemble are different: more zany, and darker. As the other members are revealed Zarrina Danaeva’s close-watching Monday seems implacable. Maria Evans’ Russo-cockney Tuesday, first to be exposed, flusters to an exit. The fantastical Cyrano Frenchman of Oliver Russell’s Wednesday is like several, excellent in sword-fights and in his case, Francophilic bombast. There’s Mickey Knighton, first as Friday, a decrepit old buffer. Except when revealed to be an actor whose multi-roling has to be slapped out of him to get the sword fighter mode, or racing driver, when required. A magnificent riffle of accents emerges.
The pacifist Saturday or Dr Bull, Andrew Bird glowers as the sinister smoke-glasses. An implacable man. Only to be revealed to be a sweet-natured peaceable soul: it’s a neat transformation. And we hardly see Sunday: but Bill Griffiths, in his celebrated inky-black tones, is, well, Sunday. And it’s him the others, now revealed, have to thwart before H.H. Asquith is chips or chops.
We bewilder as Rosamund Gregory and her fellow policemen do, till we’re at the laughing face of God. There’s a spoiler. Except that Ulterior Motives ditch it. And a good thing too. The original ending was described by Martin Seymour-Smith as “an affirmation of faith but a failure of the imagination.” No. What the end is now – and this isn’t a spoiler, since you’d not guess the context – is astonishingly the last 10 lines of Pope’s (1742 version) of Book 4 of The Dunciad. With the “universal Anarch” recruited for very different conclusions. It’s a piece of magnificent daring, an insolence worthy of Chesterton: proving the poet can after all complete something. But then what?
Masters also lights and creates sound design for the show. It’s more than a tour-de-farce as this reading interrogates the nature of authority and its desires; the nature of anarchism for us now. And above all the relevance of a novel repurposed and sent back time-travelling to 1908: like a secret, explosive mission. Wonderful, the most creative yet spiritually faithful adaptation I’ve seen. After a culture-shock, Chesterton might have applauded. You must see this.
Photo Credit Samuel Masters
