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RADIANT BOY – A HAUNTING 

by Nancy Netherwood

directed by Júlia Levai

Southwark Playhouse Borough – The Little, London – until 14 June 2025

running time: 1 hour 50 minutes including interval 

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/radiant-boy/

If you’ve seen a fair amount of theatre over the years, it’s increasingly rare to come across a play that feels like a true original, but here’s one. Certainly writer Nancy Netherwood uses elements of existing genres – ghost story, thriller, queer coming-of-age tale, kitchen sink drama – but she fuses those elements into something unique and, yes, haunting. Radiant Boy – A Haunting, premiering in a ferociously well acted production by Júlia Levai for Cloudburst theatre company, is a spellbinding piece of theatrical storytelling that has the glow of the familiar but refracted in multiple different directions that render it fresh and compelling. It’s also, when it needs to be, thoroughly creepy.

Young Russell (Stuart Thompson, utterly brilliant) returns home to early 1980s North East England from his music college course in London after an unspecified incident. His mother Maud (a grimly convincing Wendy Nottingham) is wary of him, referring back to a time when there was a major, irreversible change in nine year old Russell and, as any concerned mum might do (!), calls in an exorcist. Is Russell actually possessed or is his distracted nature and superhuman ability to control the lighting at moments of high stress a manifestation of the sexuality that Maud is struggling to come to terms with (this is the ‘80s remember)? If it sounds preposterous on paper, the shuddering atmosphere of foreboding that director Levai and her design team conjure up, along with the unhistrionic truth in the acting and Netherwood’s snappy, spare dialogue, means that you buy into it pretty much immediately. 

Thompson, making good on the promise he showed in the Almeida Spring Awakening and the Globe Ghosts, is simply extraordinary. His Russell is a beguiling mixture of defensiveness, cynicism and melancholy, shot through with a sly wit and a louche, languorous physicality. The sort of human who is used to being the smartest, most sensitive person in the room and is resigned to the isolation that brings, it’s a richly textured portrayal. 

Although the writing for her role possesses less colours, and has a backstory monologue in the second half which is the only time where Netherwood’s work gets a tad clunky, Nottingham is also doing very fine, honest work as his bewildered, disapproving mother. Ben Allen skilfully straddles the line between reassuring and ambiguous as the “spiritual therapist” Maud has enlisted to help her son. Renée Lamb, a performer I was mainly familiar with through multiple musical theatre credits, is pretty sensational in a dual role (or is it?!) as Steph, the college friend instrumental in emotionally unlocking Russell, and an all-consuming presence with far-reaching consequences on his life. 

Lamb gets to sing here too (Russell and Steph are music students), and when she does it’s magical. Thompson also has a cracking voice and the juxtaposition of eerie folk and evocative 1980s pop is very powerful. Plus any play that includes a section fangirling over the vocals of Alison Moyet, as we get here, is one I am on board with. The musical elements throughout are captivating and discombobulating, whether acoustic or filtered through the imaginative sound design by Patch Middleton.

Technically, Levai’s accomplished, engrossing production is pretty much flawless. Tomas Palmer’s set encompasses a conventional living room and the sense of being a liminal space, both naturalistic and not quite real, and Lucia Sánchez Roldan’s lighting is suitably unsettling. I’m not sure the play really needs the interval as it briefly decompresses us from the tension and magic, and the script really isn’t that long.

It’s not fair to give away too much about what happens, not that Netherwood ever gives us specific answers which may prove frustrating to some, but at its most potent, it feels as though something truly elemental is being unleashed in that tiny space. Chilling, thrilling stuff and the chance to see one of the most exciting stage actors of this generation at close quarters. Book before it sells out.