Karl Maschek, Roger K. Weiss and Dale Sandlin (Photo by Jerimy & Alyssa Leal & Zombie Joe)
Reviewed by Martín Hernández
ZJU Theatre Group
Through September 12
RECOMMENDED
Dale Sandlin, Roger K. Weiss, Karl Maschek (Photo by Jerimy & Alyssa Leal & Zombie Joe)
Renowned English playwright Howard Brenton has written over 50 plays in the past 60-plus years. Now 83, his most recent, in 2025 is Churchill in Moscow, a dramatization of Winston Churchill’s and Joseph Stalin’s top secret – and allegedly vodka-soaked – 1942 Kremlin meeting to prevent Hitler from kicking their asses. An avowed socialist (“All my plays are written unreservedly in the cause of socialism”), Brenton revels in mocking society’s norm, skewering sacred cows, and deriding capitalism’s deleterious effects.
Brenton’s 1969 play, Christie in Love, follows that tack in this unsettling depiction of the life of notorious London rapist and serial killer John Reginald Christie. Set in 1953, the play references Christie’s sexual assaults that so shocked England, while shedding light on the incompetence of London’s Scotland Yard, and how the press used the crimes’ tawdry details to sell newspapers. With his cast keenly executing their quirky yet intense roles, director Zombie Joe brings nuance in staging this early iconoclastic work that posits how Christie’s crimes perhaps resulted from a feeble mind infected by a deranged society rather than an organically deranged mind maneuvering through an “orderly” society.
Prior to the play’s opening, an exhausted Constable (Karl Maschek) painstakingly shovels a pile of newspapers from one side of the small stage to another, a metaphor equating the tabloid press as garbage for exploiting – and sometimes fabricating – Christie’s salacious peccadilloes. After all, Brenton’s and David Hare’s 1985 satire Pravda lambasted a news publisher based on Rupert Murdoch and his focus on lurid stories to garner sales – Hare was also Christie in Love’s original director.
After a light-hearted welcome from the director, the play begins with the dimwitted Constable gleefully reciting risqué limericks while digging through the detritus of newsprint. Popping in between the Constable’s pornographic poems, a staid police Inspector (Dale Sandlin) admonishes the Bobby to keep digging for “the bones” in the fenced-in yard of Christie’s squalid flat at 10 Rillington Place. When the Constable finds what he is looking for, he and the Inspector carry off a life-size and faceless cloth dummy, a depersonalized entity embodying the normalization of sexual violence against women.
Eventually, Christie (Roger K. Weiss) makes an untimely appearance while concealing himself behind a grotesque mask. Once the mask is removed, Christie is lit from below by the Bobbies’ flashlights, taking on a devilish visage as the shadows from this eyeglass look like horns above his eyes. Christie goes into a fevered rant regarding his long-held loathing of women and having to measure up to their and the culture’s expectations of manhood.
We also get voiceovers from Christie’s past, suggesting a rough upbringing that gives insight to his misogyny. Once under the Inspector’s intense interrogation, however, more is revealed about Christie’s penchants and his duplicitous role years prior in the false murder conviction of another person – and his fooling the cops to do that. In one harrowing sequence, the Constable ventriloquizes the dummy as he and Christie reenact one of the killer’s more chilling acts, a scene encapsulating the scope of Christie’s deviance.
As always with a ZJU production, the subject matter is grim yet delivered with aplomb and dark humor, with the uncredited lighting and sound enhancing the eerie atmosphere. Maschek’s Constable serves at times as comic relief but rises to dramatic finesse in his pivotal scene with Weiss’s Christie. Sandlin’s Constable epitomizes the “stiff upper lip” English stereotype but can get vicious as his patience with Christie wears thin regarding “the ladies in your own backyard.”
Portraying a man belittled by others all his life, Weiss embodies the hangdog Christie in his scenes with the Inspector and the Constable. In his monologue and other key moments, however, Weiss’s otherwise milquetoast Christie revels in the monster he has become, the crimes he has committed, and man his culture has made of him.
Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group, 4850 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Fri.-Sat., 8:30 pm; thru Sept. 12. https://www.tix.com/ticket-sales/zombiejoes/4552 Running time 45 minutes with no intermission
