Brighton Fringe 2025
Deborah Clair Dangerous to Know
CLAIR/OBSCUR
Genre: Costume, Dark Comedy, Drama, Feminist Theatre, Fringe Theatre, Historical, Horror, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: The Lantern Theatre
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
A 19th-century-clad woman walks in red-out gloom to a cross-covered altar. She removes the cross, flings up her arms, produces a knife; seems intent on some gothic rite. “Claire!” another woman interrupts her. Deborah Clair’s Dangerous to Know plays at The Lantern Theatre directed by Lucy Speed till May 10th.
An absorbing hidden gem and a must-see of the early Fringe.
Review
To the sound of an orchestra tuning up, then Mozart’s Magic Flute Queen of the Night aria, a 19th-century-clad woman walks in red-out gloom to a cross-covered altar. She removes the cross, flings up her arms, produces a knife; seems intent on some gothic rite. “Claire!” another woman interrupts her. Deborah Clair’s Dangerous to Know plays at The Lantern Theatre directed by Lucy Speed till May 10th. The 21.00 spot.
It’s July 1841 in St Mary Magdalene Church, Hucknall Torkard. Byron’s restless place, since no-one’s ever stopped speculating about him. Two historical characters, Byron’s former, embittered mistress Claire Clairmont (Chantal Riches) is confronted by her “sister”, writer and widow Mary Shelley (Deborah Clair). What follows is on the one side justification: Mary arrived too early, but was certainly sent for mysteriously: Claire can’t do this alone. And Mary herself seems more direct, emotionally more open.
Both have secrets, it just depends on how far to the end of two nights they have to unravel them. And how much blood is tied to unearthing secrets; what blood, loss and secrets lies between the two women. Can they survive what they dig up? And who else is with them?
Clair’s revisiting Mary Shelley territory after her 2023 Conception around the writing of Frankenstein, a stranger play than monsters could imagine. She’s also known for her SOE plays about World War Two women agents. All these (including this one in a double text) are published by Methuen. They’re exquisitely, precisely written and directions are naturally followed in this production: director Speed calibrates everything to an hour.
Both women are outcasts. “In Mary Shelley’s day society dictated the need for women to be wives. If not, the other paths were decidedly perilous: spinster, divorced, widow, harlot…corpse” Clair writes. Founder of CLAIR/OBSCUR, a female-led company, she’s a playwright specialising in historical recreation with the latest scholarly thinking; then imaginative leaps to places scholarship might raise a clove of garlic to. If it believed in it.
Clair herself is consummate. Her Mary seems as iron-reasonable as Mary’s mother Mary Wolstencraft, controlled, warm, a touch impish, yet poised: her very warmth is layered with revelations teased out by circumstance. Riches even physically is her foil. With sharp angular movements, furtive, abrupt speech patterns, her Claire’s a soul ever caught off-balance and forever off-kilter. Riches shows Claire’s balance as perilous, her solutions extreme yet rational. He clipped responses fly off like someone’s taking a chisel to a monument. Speaking of which…
Claire’s fragility is justified and heart-wrenching. Her child to Byron, Allegra, was taken from her, dying in a convent; she never saw her again. Months after, Mary, who’d lost two children also lost her husband Percy, and 20 months later Byron, the hated yet loved, died, was buried in pomp: and here he is. Both women are almost defined by loss, though not quite. And yet this makes for dark laughter and a love that lies how many histories deep?
The comic grind of two contrasting personalities explodes like a gothic double-act. What’s that crunching sound Claire asks? Mary doesn’t tell her the truth. Yet this is in the middle of reflecting they’re not the only ones who’ve lost children. Clair’s writing and they two actors bring out some black humour.
Nevertheless the two women have known each other most of their lives. Clair and Riches bring out this quicksilver elliptical way intimates enjoy of half-lights the other picks out. All these though are clear without it in the least explaining to the audience. There’s profound love, respect and downright irritation.
Nicholas Collett’s sound – from graunching stones, to voiceover, to thunder and of course music is consummate. The voice itself’s deliberately muffled but clear enough. Joy Iliff’s lighting plays on gothic red guignol, and deep glooms. Elsewhere it’s a brightness to cast shadows. Patricia Morris and Thom Collett’s costumes are early-Victorian off-blues.
The set comprises two simple chairs and a stark white shroud concealing what seems like an altar, and cross. It’s all that’s needed.
Clair concludes of her characters: “Mary and Claire were completely off-grid with their choices – elopement, travel, children out of wedlock; Mary was also a thinker and writer. Their lives straddled two eras – Romantic and Victorian – and the latter really didn’t know what to do with them!”
No longer defined by their great poet lovers, Mary Shelley is emerging in particular as a major author (The Last Man, for instance), and daughter of a pioneering feminist. Her, Claire Clairmont arrives with her own towering grief and snapped-off agency.
There’s magnificent twists. You might guess what Claire’s up to early on. But not all the twirls that follow, and a sonic surprise. We’re lucky to see a play that deserves a national tour, perhaps paired with Conception. If you can’t attend, buy the volume from Methuen. An absorbing hidden gem and a must-see of the early Fringe.
Hair Design Lorraine Collett, Voice of Lord Byron Jonathan Kemp, Original Photography Peter Mould, Production Photography Peter Williams, Sound and Light Operator Erin Buckeridge.
