FringeReview UK 2025
The Grim
Southwark Playhouse and RBM Comedy
Genre: Absurd Theatre, Dark Comedy, Drama, Horror, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Southwark Playhouse Little Studio, Borough
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Like his first play You’re Dead, Mate, Edmund Morris’s second play The Grim was a smash at the Edinburgh Fringe. Again, Ben Woodhall directs this transfer for a short run at Southwark’s Borough Little till December 6.
An exhilarating ride with those who won’t lie down
Review
“He had a way with the dead.” The anxiety of influence. Sean’s inherited an undertaker business just two weeks earlier on his father’s sudden death. And it gets funnier. Not only does assistant Robert keeping dragging Catholic superstition in, there’s some unfinished business a dead murderer has with the living. Laying him out is about as easy as taking on Mohammad Ali at his best. Like his first play You’re Dead, Mate, Edmund Morris’s second play The Grim was a smash at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2024. Again, Ben Woodhall directs this transfer for a short run at Southwark’s Borough Little till December 6.
Edmund Morris himself plays Sean, with Robert taken by Louis Davison (recently performing a revival of Philip Ridley’s Poltergeist at the Arcola). In a game of uneven halves – 30 and 45 minutes – this brisk play might have been performed in 75 minutes straight. It gives Southwark a chance to dispense drinks. But the climax of the first half is irresistible. Nevertheless, th richness of the second act with all three characters bouncing off treat terror and vengeance, is less comedic and more stripped-back questions. Dare I say morality play?
So why is Harry Carter playing the latest resident stiff Joe Gallagher? Replete with bullet-holes in the head and a huge torso bruise. Soon the pratfalling tactless Sean is lamenting “So this is it now? You and me, running a bed and breakfast for ghosts?” But it’s not good to utter tactless smears like “pikey”, even if Joe does offer you one of your own sweets. And where does Sean’s journalist girlfriend Rita come into it?
Morris’s play offers profound reflections wrapped up in farce. Part black-comedy-thriller, part revengers’ comedy with horror grace-notes and nods to Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen and The Lieutenant of Inishmore, it asks uniquely: what justice is possible for the underclass when the police are the violators? As the reason for Gallagher’s explosive return unfold, there’s non-Buddhist reasons ghosts are hungry, and not always for your mum’s sandwiches or your strawberry laces. Though there’s those too. Though set in 1964, the questions are aimed at today’s police, today’s oppressors.
Morris and Davison perform an ideal double-act, of nervous things-are-getting-weird Sean, always reacting with an awkwardly brilliant one-liner as Sean panics his way through aversity, to the extreme of asking his head to be cut off to end the terror. “I can’t even have my head cut off by the chief beheader in the country” Sean wails. He’s so ungrateful. Davison’s Robert is altogether more fatalistic, conjuring The Grim of the title to explain the spooking whilst Sean’s out (it’s interesting Londoner Sean has an Irish name, and Robert a Scottish one). Davison brings a subtly banshee-haunted sense of doom with him. Each have their inhibitions and boundaries, which of course clash sublimely.
So does Joe Gallagher, and several are discovered at once. “It’s rude to interrupt” he growls menacingly as Sean slithers backwards yet again. When confronted with news of his own death in a newspaper (Sean doesn’t dare tell him outright) Joe insists on reading the sports side first; and is disappointed by Blackburn (Carter’s home town in fact). This is by the way after the undertakers have found Joe some clothes to put on.
Carter is superb. Rippling menace – not always easy in underpants – he layers both gangster humour (pure Orton and McDonagh) with a psychic wound far more troubling than those he visibly carries. Carter hints how Roma origins have both thrust Joe to where he was and how the police have dealt with the disappearance of a family member.
Hiba Medina’s period costumes and design – a metal table as mortuary slab, a white-tiled wall with a telephone, and a careless hammer with a few eatables – are all that’s needed as wild things swirl inches from your feet. The rectangular horseshoe seating encourages all kinds of flinch. Joe Hawkings conjures a spook of lighting and effects, with Fergus Carver’s gloopy sounds.
By the end another volte-face and a final line from Joe leave us in some suspense as to what will happen next. I’m not sure everything’s unpacked in that last clever outburst, and not all the rich potential landed. But it’s close. Morris needs to push beyond his easy answer because there’s a serious writer and a serious, even devastating farce trying to rise from the fringes. But it’s an exhilarating ride with those who won’t lie down.
Producers RBM Comedy, Technician Joe Hawkings, Technical Manager Ali Day, Voice of Ronald Rigby Kevin Brewer, Voice of Erin Gallagher Takiyah Kamaria.
