Brighton Fringe 2025

Medium

Isaac Freeman and ACT

Genre: Autobiography, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Historical, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre, Verbatim Theatre

Venue: Main Studio, The Lantern Theatre

Festival: Brighton Fringe, Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Gaslighting, influencing, grooming, coercion. Long before the digital age the ghosts in the machine were copper wire, ectoplasm that could be snipped, and some strategically-placed white roses. Isaac Freeman’s debut play Medium now runs two days in the main Lantern theatre, helmed by ACT’s co-artistic director Jannette Eddisford at the  Tom Thumb and Hot Tap Theatres at Margate and Hastings; and now back at its home venue, the Lantern till November 8. Her direction’s impressed on the drama’s quality of detail and nuance. It’s as palpable as a conjurer’s.

Those who’ve seen this play grow, from an excerpt in February 2024, to a 65-minute Fringe work this May, wondered where this promising if flawed work might go next. It’s now nearer 77 minutes, has grown from a two-hander to four  actors. It’s not often either we see both playwriters and actors drawn from the same school in a debut production. ACT Brighton with its Lantern Theatre doubles as a drama school for actors and writers, whilst producing and receiving fringe theatre shows year-round. The play too has moved from the Grania Dean Studio to the main Lantern theatre.

So Medium was a two-hander. At its core it still is, though interrupted by two other actors, as each character interacts alone with Luke O’Dell’s Thompson who’s on stage throughout.

It’s 1875. A contained young man Thompson, sits at his table in an immaculately evoked 1870s interior, himself coiffed in impressive costumery and make-up: long frock-coats, a period dress and make-up are impressive, suggesting more a good run than three short theatre-stops. This time the downstairs Lantern is impressively lit by Eddisford and Erin Buckridge; dimmed at the point the candles become effective, and with a plush vermillion interior.

Thompson’s manicured to an alarming degree. His older co-worker Campbell (Dominic Hart) arrives and is disinclined to abet Thompson in his need to fake results. Thompson’s extremely tense (perhaps occasionally too much so in O’Dell’s impressive reading). We discover an old flame has turned into a medium-buster. Hart nuances Campbell as a reluctant, jaded faker of miracles. Campbell exits and we’re left with the Thompson in the room.

Thompson’s waiting for the Man (who in fact wrote these memoirs but remained anonymous) now played by Daniel Finlay (the role’s originator Roland Hamilton is sadly ill). Finlay enters cloaked and flustered in less pristine garb. After a riff of a Domenico Scarlatti sonata on accordion, which you’d not expect, the insistent but never overloud ticking of a Victorian clock invokes obsession. It’s a little like a Magritte, but earlier of course.

Medium’s a snappier title than the original. Ten years with spiritual mediums: an inquiry concerning the etiology of certain phenomena called spiritual 1875. Anonymous and based on a true story, it’s already been turned into an audio play in 2010 that Freeman’s made a point of not hearing. Medium is a work interrogating later Victorian hokum, and something not far from Strindberg’s extremes of control and paranoia. (It should be remembered Strindberg was much taken with alchemy and spirits).

From the 1840s through 1920s the surge in spiritualism took hold, particularly contacting the spirits of the young and children: who all too often died too early, or latterly in war – both the American Civil War and World War One. Perhaps the climax came with the Cottingley Fairies Hoax in 1917, which sent Arthur Conan Doyle into a tailspin of belief.

After the rainswept Man arrives, blustery and receiving distinct initial hostility from Thompson, these two favourite London spiritualist Mediums sit, bolt up and wheel about with brandies (realistic for once) waiting for a séance to begin. One smokes. The other drinks more whilst perpetually offering the other: a displacement worthy of ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’. But not everything is right… at least to the Man. Kate his fiancée, whom he had briefly put off marrying this coming June, arrived and left before he came. She’s apparently ditched him. Well she never believed, says Thompson, and the Man admits he was clearly giving himself to spiritualism over Kate every time. Thompson suggests the Man move in with him.

Finlay is sovereign as a naturally powerful man cowed by the vehement, violent and manipulative Thompson. The gradations of his response are impressive: because The Man shows ability to snoop for himself, discover facts, and yet be beaten down. Only to rise again. You begin to think the chemistry between these two is becoming increasingly unstable. Despite Thompson’s desperate measures to keep his milch-cow – the one accredited medium – in tow.

There’s more. The Man himself exits conveniently as yet another character, Madeleine Brooks (Bek MacGeekie) arrives. In MacGeekie’s hands she glows with youthful enthusiasm but hides a steely resolve and dissimulations of her own. Brooks is an apparent ingenue, only here because of an uncle, apparently asleep downstairs. Thompson’s playing at Tarot is clearly part of a very different control: sexual predation. Is Brooks so taken in, or is there something more elaborate being plotted? As Finlay’s Man returns, we learn Uncle Brooks hadn’t been sleeping at all but is playing cards. It’s a thread not yet followed.

The Man declared it useful to listen and learn from Campbell, and just has. But Thompson informs the Man that Campbell, after tonight’s lecture on spiritualism, is leaving both spiritualism and the neighbourhood. Later we discover threads. The Man might confront Campbell now. Thompson merely asks: Where’s Ashton?

There’s much use of historic characters. Thompson was raised in Boston Mass and has no trace, he’s proud to say, of that refined accent. There he met William Mumler (1832-84), arch spiritualist photographer, who photographed Abraham Lincoln’s widow with the dead president hovering behind. Well it might just be double exposure. Either way, he might just be turning up too. There’s Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927), American spiritualist, suffragist, advocate of free love and who ran for the presidency of the USA in 1872. And her newspaper. Stakes are high. Tonight there’s people arriving who need confirmation.

This is a slow-burn, lovingly detailed piece of theatre. Its atmosphere is undeniable. Finlay’s particularly effective at suggesting slow crumbling panic, things withheld. But also a stubborn residual strength: snooping out the suitcase and withholding information. O’Dell reins his menace effectively. Occasionally O’Dell raises  his voice when a more menacing, hissier fury would do. O’Dell is a fresh graduate and it’s a delight to see the actors slowly settle into who they might be next.

Freeman has wrought much from original material. 20 minutes of this in 2024 was exciting, and May’s 65 minutes held longeurs and drops in energy, here avoided by the continual attempt of Thompson to dominate the Man, and to a lesser extent Campbell and Brooks. Thompson’s attempts on the Man are similar of affect and intensify, though the pattern is slightly repetitive.

The challenge lies in expanding from a two-hander and not simply creating a series of Turgenev-like duets. There’s three characters on stage for the briefest of moments. The unvarying catalyst is Thompson. If you have four actors, it’s not effective to craft a series of duets only, always revolving round the core character. There needs to be a second act, a reckoning and an apotheosis, perhaps with all four characters. There’s huge potential here and a complex ballet of discoveries awaits: Campbell and the Man, Brooks and her lying about her sleeping uncle. Thompson shouldn’t be the only unvarying villain.  Dramatic stasis though is partly the result of the recalcitrant source material needing more – or less.

Despite the additional characters, there’s still not quite enough variety of pace, texture and David Wood’s “suddenlys” to keep our eyes fresh-peeled with words to astonish the brickwork. Sometimes facts need breaking open to express truth. In this rewrite, Freeman has intimated this, shadowing Pinteresque menace and withholding. There still needs to be a great finish. Now we have the ingredients. This needs a further draft, a further expansion. And to escape the bonds of verisimilitude. If the memoirist gained such insights, what did he do next? Freeman has the permission of a tabula rasa.

Freeman’s command of material and atmosphere though make him a name to look out for. Daring work; and Freeman will dare again.

Production Photography Peter Williams. Sound and Light Operator Erin Burbridge.

Published November 9, 2025November 9, 2025 by Simon Jenner