“Bury the Hatchet” Southwark Playhouse, Borough

Anyone seeing that truth-based history – with its vaudeville but heroic king, saving 50,000 Bulgarian Jews and poisoned by Hitler – might guess what they’re in for here. Quite apart from the violin, guitar and mandolin of the three actors. Whilst Boris III is often funny, it’s deeply serious. So is Bury the Hatchet at times, but it’s more broadly funny, more local. The title sets the tone. You can have more gags with less bodies. Ultimately there’s less at stake here than Wilson’s ambitious (and occasionally sublime) successor.

That isn’t to belittle the tone of Wilson’s creation or the murders themselves; nor the fervid voyeurism of the trial, and the circumstances where the state had decided not to hang women: in part so people couldn’t look up their skirts. Much though has to be stripped away for the sensationalism of legend to get to the sensation of a young woman arraigned for the brutal murder of her overbearing – and mostly mean – father Andrew and stepmother Abby: who had seen to it that much of the family fortune was siphoned off to her relatives (to be fair, one or two needed it). Add the stopover of a maternal uncle John abnormally close to his niece, as is a maid Bridget O’Sullivan, called “Maggie’ as all maids were (literally reducing O’Sullivan to a generic and not a human being), and the ingredients are there. And an absent elder sister Emma, some miles away. Who sticks to Lizzie throughout. As does Bridget.

Wilson’s style is a superbly-interrupted bricolage of bald fact, docu-quotes interpolated by gags, narrative fillets, speculative flights and sheer theatrics. And plenty of fourth-wall moments. When one actor speaks Southern drawl Wilson quips “it’s the only accent he can do” and the accent immediately modulates to east coast. Not even murders are sacred. Judging by uproarious audience response, this version of the Lizzie Borden case must surely garner more laughs than any dramatic treatment of her over the past 134 years.       

Lawrence Boothman and David Leopold take on multiple characters, male and female, with writer Sasha Wilson as Lizzie, centring the action. Whether home, courtroom or parts of town, the trio shift from performative catches broken-off at times to an array of accents and genders, occasionally guyed. They’re consummate, so adroit they can turn on an axe-head and deliver it glinting.

August 4 1892 has spawned an industry, with the very house and sofa where Andrew was butchered now a themed B&B. The public fascination with these murders made it both one of the most documented yet most evidentially polluted. Local incompetence meant bodies were shifted, moved onto the kitchen table whilst the occupants slept; whilst later the prosecution detached the skulls (the bodies had been left un-refrigerated and decomposed), and presented them in court. This was too much; one of the reasons the fainting Lizzie was famously acquitted.

Wilson’s adept at introducing evidence in an order it can be assimilated and patterned. The purchase of prussic acid (cyanide) by Lizzie the previous day to clean winter sealskin (really?), and sickness of most pf the household on old mutton was ruled as too far back for the murder (we’re talking a matter of hours here). The local doctor for instance administering morphine to Lizzie so her testimony, being self-contradictory enough, might be explained by the fact that she was pretty non compos mentis. Or basically high. Difficult enough if you were a clear-headed murderer, getting facts right. By contrast uncle John unnerves the police by giving over-precise explanations of where he was, down to the number of the cabman’s badge. Their suppositions are aroused.

Wilson introduces moments of speculation. An incestuous relationship meaning John – who’d been involved in heated negotiations over disposing the family fortune –  dispatches the couple for his beloved Lizzie. Or that Lizzie, later reputed to be gay, was discovered enjoying a tryst with Bridget by her stepmother. There might be no way back from that. Certainly that latter explanation has gained a lot of traction over the past 40 years. Yet there’s contradictions everywhere. O’Sullivan later married, though what does that prove? Everything’s presented from pre-meditation to spur-of-the-hatchet; and of course, persons unknown.