Review of a 'snappy' comedy-horror play

Now enjoying a two-week run at the Southwark Playhouse, Edmund Morris’s play The Grim is a nifty little comedy-horror calling card set in an undertaker's in 1960s Bethnal Green. 

Cockney proprietor Shaun (played by Morris himself) and his Irish Catholic assistant Rob (Louis Davison) have recently taken receipt of the body of notorious hardman and murderer Jackie Gallagher (Harry Carter), and the superstitious Rob has got the wind put up him something proper imagining the evil spirits that might accompany such a corpse.

As the double act carrying the production, Morris and Davison have decent chemistry and prove themselves able with Morris’s snippy, snappy dialogue, rattling through the compressed world-building at double speed. Textural details like the family history of both characters are nice to have, but the time might have been better spent in slowing down and luxuriating a little. 

What’s lost specifically is the sense of Shaun and Rob as real friends. Like many early comedy scripts, this one is preoccupied with argy-bargy – the affection and tenderness that should be an equally valuable comic tool is drowned out by the rat-a-tat sniping. 

Davison is allowed to show his sensitive side a little more, and he wears it well, but Morris goes a mite too broad in his performance, loudly blowing off the possibility of 'heebie-jeebie bollocks' going on in his recently-inherited shop.

The show is more in its element with the comedy, and the establishing first half is the more successful of the two. Tonally, Morris handles the blending of genre elements pretty well, although they’re inevitably constrained by their budget and indie context – the horror bits largely boil down to some flickering lights and some whispering on the audio track, although they did score a jump scare that had one audience member hurling her wineglass over the entire back row.

The second half gives Harry Carter much more to do, showing his ability to be aggressive and scary, albeit overwhelming the production at times with his repeated table-bangings and long, serious monologues. 

Raising the stakes of the narrative in an unexpected and effective way, the shift into a more high-tension mode starts showing cracks in the plotting, as gaps in logic become more noticeable. Without giving too much away, it’s a symptom of your investment in the characters and their predicament that you might feel a little frustrated with these plot holes, and shows just how difficult it can be to blend sitcom shenanigans with life-and-death peril.

The Grim shows its hand as an early work from time to time, but there’s plenty of promise in what Morris has come up with.